Upskilling: Project-based learning

April 25, 2020January 11, 2022 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

In a burst of COVID-19 lockdown energy I decided to raid our Book Closet and read, re-read, learn and re-learn from some of my home education pedagogical inspirations.

“Project-Based Homeschooling: Mentoring Self-Directed Learners” written by Lori Pickert was the first book I picked up.

Like many of the books I have read over the past decade, “Project-Based Homeschooling” is full of practical advice. The “how to” is intertwined with the “why you should”.

One of the things that I like about this particular book is that project-based learning isn’t touted at the “only” way to home educate. Ms Pickert outlines all of the very excellent reasons why it should be part of a child’s learning experience, possibly making up the majority of their learning, but she doesn’t do so in a way that generates a feeling of pedagogical “tribalism”.
I appreciated that tone from the outset.

Here are the key points that I took away from my re-reading of this book.

Children should be given the opportunity to self-choose, self-direct and self-manage their own interest projects.

Our job is not to “teach” them, but to observe, support, give our attention to their work and mentor them.

We should align our daily habits, our routines and our values so that we can create a family culture that reflects the importance of the child’s project work. (And our own projects too!)

As Ms Pickert says:
“Make the space. Make the time. Gather the materials. Prioritize the experience. Commit.” p.39

Re-reading this book has been timely for me as Miss Oh has been working on a substantial passion project with one of her friends. She has been asking me for support with this, so I wanted to revisit the encouraging information about mentoring a child’s project before I began to help.
It is extremely important that I reduce the chance of any “foot in mouth” issues on my part that might lead to her becoming discouraged.

One of the simplest, and most important, ideas that we are implementing is that of regular “Project Time”. Miss and Master Oh have each chosen a day when they will get my full attention for their chosen project.
My responsibility, in my own words, is to show up and shut up.
Reflective listening, guiding them with questions, helping them note their ideas and then sitting back and watching what they come up with.
It sounds simple when it’s written down but, depending on your temperament, it can be incredibly difficult to do in practice.

But just like the Oh Waily kids, I need to practice my mentoring skills, learn from my mistakes and figure out what to try next when I mess up. That takes care of the ‘modelling’ aspect of this type of learning.

“This is how we master a skill, a tool, a material, a technique – through play, through practice, through making and fixing mistakes.” p. 37

Some other big ideas that I’ll be doing my best to implement include:

Let them make mistakes and then let them solve their own problems.
Don’t “rescue” them, but don’t abandon them either. This is the point where you mentor problem solving.
Encourage them to do their own research.
Don’t “help” in order to save them time, thereby robbing them of an opportunity for some great learning.
Encourage them to do “Fieldwork”.
i.e. use community resources, visit with or contact experts, etc.
Model resilience when they hit frustration points.
Use this simple, calm and reassuring response from the book: “Now we know what doesn’t work. What should we try next?”
I love this so much because it gently directs back in to problem-solving mode without drama and links to the last idea…
Project calm acceptance that mistakes are inevitable.
Then encourage them to understand that the response to mistakes is to try to find a solution in order to move forward.

There is a lot more to this book than I have distilled here, and a lot of very specific suggestions about what you can do to promote a great learning experience for your children. There’s more detail on why you should seriously consider incorporating this approach in to your home education toolkit and what benefits your children will gain. They are significant.

If you are interested in learning about how to implement this sort of child-led learning, then this book is a good guide. And if the following quote, one of my favourites, appeals to you then this might be a book that would sit well on your shelves.

“With a slow pace, an open and inquiring mindset, and calm acceptance that problems are inevitable, we set the tone for a thoughtful approach to meaningful work. We begin to create a family culture that values interests, intellect, perseverance, resilience, and sharing.”

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Rosemary: Secular Homeschool Magazine

June 2, 2019April 20, 2020 / Ms Oh Waily / 3 Comments

“Rosemary” is a secular homeschool magazine produced out of the U.S.A.

It comes out three times a year – Spring, Autumn and Winter. I joined their Patreon page for the Digital edition and duly received my copy of the current issue – Spring – which is themed around History.

How could I have resisted? It’s history!

Here is a quick look at the inside of this particular issue, from their Patreon page.

As you can see from the video, the magazine is advert free while the art is beautiful throughout. There are articles by folk you may have come across in your home education journey, such as Julie Bogart and Peter Gray.

In total there are eight articles over the 60 pages, an obligatory book section and a lovely essay.

The entire magazine was light and easy to read, as well as beautiful to look at.

It is, as you would expect, focused on topics in American history but the ideas and questions raised by James W. Loewen in his article, “Should We Lie About Columbus?”, certainly resonates in other countries with a colonial history.

The articles are a good length, with just enough detail and ideas to digest. More than one of them addressed the topics of bias and pre-conceived ideas, as well as exhortations to question them.

I don’t know if there is enough in each issue to keep me as a long term subscriber but it might make a nice addition to a support group library where the cost is spread out amongst many families and there is a gap for a secular homeschool magazine.

I’d love to hear your opinion if you have already read an issue. Let’s chat.

Patch Pick: The Tree of Life lab

March 31, 2019April 21, 2020 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

The Pukeko Patch kids recently caught up with one of our favourite YouTube channels, Minute Earth.
The video they watched included a promotion of Minute Earth’s website where you are able to interactively explore the Tree of Life. The video was about clades and is called You Are A Fish.

The website – Minutelabs.io – includes a section called the Tree of Life Explorer.

It makes a good first entry to our Patch Pick series, where I post about interesting websites, apps or other resources we come across in our internet wanderings.

Does your kid loves science? Are you learning about how all life on Earth is connected? This is a tool for you.
It is graphical and has links to websites like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. That will launch a whole new world of exploration and information gathering.

Enjoy!

The Dangers of the Library

February 5, 2019April 21, 2020 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

This week is our first week back “at school”.

We took the first week of term off as a holiday because the kids just managed to complete enough of the unfinished core curricula from last year shortly before that. Considering they spent most of their summer break doing the catch up, it seemed to be fair and sensible not to start back at it so quickly.

It’s gone really well for the first couple of days. We decided to try a randomised method of deciding on the daily work. This way there are, hopefully, going to be fewer arguments over what joint subjects to do and when.

The kids have figured out how many sessions of each subject area they need to do each week. They reduced it down to a four day week because we think our Wednesdays are going to be full with other activities.
Miss Oh Waily made tiny little notes of each of the subject areas. She folded them up and put in to her winter wooly hat. They both take turns to pick a paper note out of the hat and do whatever lesson it says.

And then came the spanner in the works.

The only problem that has arisen was when I went to find which branch of the library one of the core science books was held at. I couldn’t find it in the catalogue.

I did a double take. Then I checked for the authors in case I was making an error in the title, but nothing. Now I began to wonder if I was imagining things.
Did I see it in the catalogue just before Christmas or was I dreaming?

So to keep a long story short, it was culled over the New Year season and someone snapped it up on the 50c table!

This is our first year of partially relying on the library to have the books we want to use. Every other year we have bought them all. That was partially because our local library is a little less *worldly* than our libraries in Wellington were, and partially because if you’ve bought it you’ve got it when you need it and you don’t have to rearrange your life around a 3 to 4 week waiting list.

Lesson learned. Buy most of the key books.

So one of the science curricula is off to a shaky start. We are now at the whims and mercy of the Book Depository gods! Let’s hope they smile on us and it’s only a couple of weeks till it arrives.

A successful and stress-ish free start to the year.
Most of the work is completed before or just after lunch (if we mess around a bit too long in the morning) which means there’s plenty of time to extend the summer holiday feeling by playing in the pool in the afternoon.

Long may this continue!

2019’s Books and More

January 26, 2019April 21, 2020 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

I posted earlier this month about what our homeschool core curricula were going to be for 2019.
Today I will share the full list of different books we will be using in our two core language based curricula – Build Your Library and Bravewriter. To make it helpful for you I’ve split them in to their different learning areas, and provided a key for the tags at the end of each title.

BYL GRADE 4 – The Modern World

Build Your Library Website

A – Audible
K – Kindle
L – Library

History:

The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 4: The Modern Age
Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun (K)
Fields of Fury: The American Civil War
Where Poppies Grow: A World War I Companion
Gandhi
Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy (K)

Literature:

These are books that I will be reading aloud to the kids.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The Twenty-One Balloons
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (A)
Nory Ryan’s Song
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
The Singing Tree
Angel on the Square
When My Name Was Keoko
Redwall (A)
Because of Winn-Dixie (L)
Shooting Kabul

Readers:

These are the books that the kids will be reading. Master Oh may skip some of these, we will see how his year progresses.

The Capture (Guardians of Ga’hoole, Book 1) (L)
James and the Giant Peach (L)
Bull Run
Rodzina
Stuart Little (L)
The Toothpaste Millionaire
Maggie’s Door
The Wizard of Oz
The Water Horse (L)
Number the Stars (L)
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
The Borrowers (L)
Who Was Martin Luther King, Jr.?
The School Story
Journey to Jo’burg: A South African Story

Poetry:

Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to Poetry

Science:

The New Way Things Work (L)
10 Inventors Who Changed the World (L)
The Usborne Internet-Linked Science Encyclopedia

Art:

Discovering Great Artists: Hands-On Art for Children in the Styles of the Great Masters
The Usborne Introduction to Art

BRAVEWRITER – Arrows

Bravewriter Website

As you can see there is A LOT of crossover between the books studied here and those we will be or have just read as part of our BYL curriculum. We will marry up the Arrow to the time of year when we are reading the book as part of BYL. I can’t tell you how happy I am that they are this well aligned. The amount of reading it saves!

Aug: Penderwicks at Last
Sep: Redwall
Oct: Mary Poppins
Nov: Journey to Jo’burg
Dec: Because of Winn Dixie
Jan: Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
Feb: Freedom Train
Mar: Harriet the Spy
Apr: By the Great Horn Spoon
May: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

The Money

For the full range of curricula, for two kids we are looking at ~NZ$500.

This splits down into:

Book Depository: $296 – $15 affiliate rebate = $281
Kindle: $29
Pandia Press: ~$60 for Earth and Space; $23 for The Stargazer’s Notebook.
My Pals Are Here! Maths – 3A & B: $54
My Pals Are Here! Maths – 5A & B: $48

This could have been reduced if I had spent the time to hunt for secondhand books, but frankly my time trying to find them would probably outweigh the savings.

I hope you found that interesting.

2019 Homeschool Curricula

January 10, 2019 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

What does 2019 hold in store for us here at the Patch?

As we have done over the past two years, we will be having a mix and match of curricula so that we touch on all of the core basic learning areas with the kids and that’s what I’ll detail for you today. We may add in extras throughout the year, depending on how we’re doing with the workload of this central core. As most of the work can be accomplished during the morning, that leaves the afternoons for the kids’ own interests or general play / downtime.

Note: rather than do one level of learning for each child we go for the middle ground, with the exception of maths, and we adjust expectations for each child based on their skill set.

The Curricula

Build Your Library (BYL) : Grade 4 – The Modern World
It covers history, literature, poetry, science and art.

Bravewriter: Arrow
We are currently mid-stream with this. It’s an annual subscription that runs with the US school year. It covers the mechanics of writing as studied from good works of children’s literature. There’s A LOT of crossover between the books used in the 2019 Bravewriter Arrow and those recommended in BYL.

Your Pals Are Here! Maths
This is a Singaporean maths series. It is supposedly used in many of their schools and I’ve found it to be pretty solid and not excessive in the amount of work required of the kids. This year they will be doing 3A & B, and 5A & B.

RSO Earth & Space – Level 1
This is a secular* science curriculum out of the US. It covers the earth sciences and astronomy. We may add in “The Stargazers Notebook”, which is a year long study of the sky. It depends on how our time and energy goes.

Extras

We may also look at doing “Bravewriter Jot It Down” for creative writing since I’d really like to encourage Master Oh’s creativity to come out in some form of writing and this may be the best way to get him moving on it.

There will also be the ongoing tutoring to assist with Master Oh’s probable dyslexia. Perhaps some use of Nessy and other apps that can reinforce the learning we will be working through.
And for variety we will probably dip in and out of Khan Academy as we need a break from our regular programme.
There may be extracurricular items as well, but they will probably come later in the year and I’ll post about any changes as we go.

As always, we try to be flexible and adapt to changing needs. What seems like a good idea today may turn out to be a horrible idea in a month or two. Watch this space for any updates.

I will be writing another post with a full listing of the books we will be using this year, along with an approximate cost for all of the year’s core curricula and resources.

Here’s to a fantastic range of learning happening in 2019 !

* I note this as secular as it’s a bit of an issue when you use curricula out of the USA.

As I’ve learned from their online secular community, a lot of the curricula available are considered “neutral” so they can be sold to people whose faith does not agree with the concept of evolution. So they skirt the subject, ignore the subject or explain it as “one theory” while giving a faith based “theory” the same platform. That, obviously, wouldn’t suit us.

Welcome back!

January 2, 2019 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly two years without a single post here at the Patch!

I’m both annoyed with myself and yet completely unsurprised by this.
Posting was already coming to a grinding halt in 2017 when at the end of the year we decided to investigate the possibility that Master Oh Waily might be dyslexic. Roll around November 2017 and the testing seemed to be pretty consistent with dyslexia. It was time to research and work out what we were going to do to adjust to this likely reality.

And that led us in to 2018. Our grind year.

The 2018 Grind

Mr Oh Waily was away for nearly half of the year – 171 days to be precise.

We took on the option of specialist tutoring twice a week for Master Oh Waily. We did this so that I could learn what would work for him and so he would have a solid foundation that I could springboard off.

Our regular learning and swimming lessons continued as usual.

Along the way we learned that dyslexia doesn’t always come on it’s own and it’s not really what you may think it is. We began to learn about executive function and memory issues. It has showed the gaps in the educational system around supporting kids with learning differences.* (If you want a formal and official diagnosis you need to pay $1000 or so to an educational psychologist and even with that there’s no practical assistance for kids with dyslexia.)

When you are out of the house three days a week, for more than half the day, it’s inevitable that a number of things slide. Even relatively important things.

In short, it was a steep learning curve with a side order of hard work, over-work and lack of rest.

By the end of the year I was out on my feet. Absolutely zoned out and over it. I rebelled **.

Moving on to 2019

The rebellion helped. I have perspective and a determination to rearrange things so that 2019 isn’t a rinse and repeat of 2018. We will be making some changes this year.
We are reducing tutoring to once a week. It’s the same amount of learning time each week, consolidated in one session. We are not returning to swimming lessons for the first term and maybe the second. This frees up two whole days each week and take the strain off other areas of our learning and life.

And in a nice moment of synchronicity I read, and watched this post by Jo Ebisujima about how she balances her work and her son’s homeschooling. Her comments about how her son organises his own pace of learning really hit home with me. As an eclectic home ed family I want us to balance out the fundamental skills with things the kids are interested in but it didn’t really click in my brain how I was going to help them to be more independent until Jo spoke about how her son worked out how many lessons a week he needs to do in order to complete his year’s work. That was like a lightning bolt moment.

“Well, duh!! We have curricula that we use for the core subjects. I can help them to figure out what they need to do to finish a year’s worth. They can own it.”

So that’s what we are currently doing. I sat down with each child and we looked through what was left of their 2018 year that had slid away on us. We worked out how many sessions for each subject were left and how many they would need to do each week before Term 1 of 2019 started. I have encouraged, reminded and suggested they tackle their lessons.

Miss Oh Waily has taken up the challenge relatively easily with occasional moments of regression.
Master Oh is a different kettle of fish, because executive functioning is an issue. I’ve taken a different tack with him. Keeping long term goals in mind is difficult with short term pleasure overriding that in a heartbeat, so I have created a shorter term reward system for him. At the moment it’s all a bit of an experiment to see what works for his planning and keeping goals in mind. And it’s a lot of reading about strategies to help executive functioning for me.

Even at this early stage of handover I’m feeling good about where this could take us and what it could mean for 2019 – and my sanity level.

The benefits of hearing just the right thing when you need it never fails to amaze me.

I’m also hopeful that my self-imposed silence is now coming to an end and that I will be posting here regularly again. I’m looking forward to 2019, I hope you are too.

* The only benefit that I’ve found so far to having an official diagnosis is when your child needs to participate in formal assessment, so there is little point in paying the money for Master Oh Waily at this point. The diagnosis is only accepted for a matter of 2 or 3 years and then you have to get another one… as though dyslexia “goes away” or “is cured” rather than being a case of permanent neurodiversity.

** See the last couple of blog posts over at Oh Waily Waily for more on obliger rebellion.

Question Time

February 19, 2017 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Do you have a question that’s been bothering you for a while, but you haven’t had the time to ask it?

Do you have a specific thing you want to know about doing home education but haven’t found it in my earlier ramblings?

Or is there something specific you would like to know about the Oh Waily family that I might be inclined to answer?

If so, now is your chance. It’s…

Leave a comment here on the blog, or over on Facebook, and I’ll do my best to answer any query you have.

Charlotte joins the Patch

February 7, 2017 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

When I went to hang out our laundry early last week I was greeted by a large spider’s web. This isn’t particularly unusual, with the exception of the size of the web and the fact that the spider was currently hanging around in the centre of it. The other shocking fact about the new web was the size of the spider who made it. I had a small heart attack moment when I spotted her. She is about 3+ cm from back toe-tip to front toe-tip, with a body roughly 1.5 cm long. That makes her the biggest spider we have come across since our move. We won’t count all the large Daddy-Longlegs spiders, who may be large and gangly but cut a considerably less imposing figure.

Here she is on that first day, caught in the middle of web-making, I suspect.

We left her alone, as I had no idea of what sort of spider she was. I took a photograph and went online to try to identify her. My usual Landcare site and Te Papa both let me down, as I couldn’t make a fair match to any of their photographs. I then asked my home educating colleagues for suggestions on alternative places to get an identification and was directed to a wonderful Facebook group called NZ Bug identification – Spiders, Insects etc where I posted this photograph. In a twinkling of an eye, I was informed that it is a garden orb web, and we’ve been watching ‘Charlotte’ ever since.

On the first day we were cruel and heartless homeowners and knocked down her web. I really wanted to be able to hang out my laundry without finding her in my undies! But just as swiftly as we knocked it down, she had built it back up. After trying one more time, I decided it was rather like Cnut trying to hold back the waves, and that for now my undies would be drying indoors on racks! Instead we would turn in to nature observers and watch our new lodger.

We have learned a few interesting things about Charlotte – the first is that according to the MPI’s website,

The garden orbweb spider will construct or repair its snare by night, then sit in the centre.

Charlotte most certainly constructs, repairs and does her housework overnight. Not only did she rebuild her web after our destruction, she also cleaned off a vast array of plant bits that the kids had flung on to the web in an attempt to pretend to be her dinner. The trickery failed miserably, but the next morning we awoke to a beautifully clean and restored web. She’s a pretty house-proud member of her species.

We have also noticed that this observation on the MPI site is also very true, even though Charlotte’s choice of hiding place may be slightly unorthodox.

During the day, garden orbweb spiders usually hides outside the web, but will rest a leg on a thread that runs to the centre.

Here is Charlotte tucked up in the peg basket, which is her home-away-from-home, with her back leg hanging on to her web. I’ve enhanced the white in the photo in the hope that you can make out the single strand of web that she’s hanging on to. (Click on the photograph to see a larger version.)

She’s also pretty tidy at wrapping up her dinner, when it is foolish enough to become home delivery. Here’s a shot of her handiwork which, by the way, was gone the next morning. Midnight snack anyone?

The newest development in the past couple of days has been the arrival of what look like two or three baby spiders on the actual web. They started out with large silvery half-shell-like things (presumably they were shells) on their back ends and are now graduating to small, unshelled spiders. Unfortunately they are too tiny for my camera to focus on without something held behind the web. Between the gentle breeze blowing the web back and forth and my kids being slightly worried that they’ll be webbed or spidered if they get too close, it’s been impossible for me to get them to help me take a photograph.
With the imminent arrival home of Mr Oh Waily, from his gallivanting overseas, I may only have to combat the camera’s ability to focus on insects so small. I will update the post if I manage to get a clear image of her children.

Here are a couple of final photographs for you. She ventured out on to the web a couple of days ago and we were able to see her speedy retreat from mid-web back to the peg basket. She paused briefly, still attached to the web that enters the basket and I was able to move around behind her and get a shot of her undercarriage. Most indelicate of me, I know, but totally fascinating nonetheless.

The final image is of me looking straight down at her, which is something of a change, as I’m usually forced to look at her side or her backside.

An interesting development has occurred at the Patch since we’ve begun watching Charlotte — the Oh Waily kids have been noticing far more insects. They’ve been coming to me and saying, ‘You’ve got to come see this Mum’, and ‘You’ve got to take a photo of this’, and ‘Can I borrow your phone to take a photograph of…, please.’ As this has been the case, I have more interesting insect images to share with you. Fleeting glimpses in to a smaller world, with lots of learning potential.

Oh, and more Charlotte updates as they come to hand.

Cohorts are not the answer

January 27, 2017 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Of the many things that our government could be doing to improve the lot of kids in the education system, this ISN’T one of them.

Yes, I have a bias. I could not envisage sending my 5 year old off to school when it was almost time for her to go. I couldn’t see how she would cope with the long days, and quite frankly, I wanted her to have a childhood full of free time, exploration and fun. No, I’m not an overprotective, paranoid about the wicked world, mother.

I began to read more about childhood development and growth as the time drew nearer, and read, and read and read. I listened to experts talk about their research. In these times of ‘don’t trust the experts’ I know just how outdated that sounds.
I then took what I learned from all of this reading, watching, listening and I weighed it up against what I could see in my own home, in front of my own eyes. I didn’t abdicate my decision to ‘experts’ but I took on board what they said and engaged my own ability to think critically.

At no point in all that reading did I come across anything that advocated for children entering earlier formal learning environments. In fact, pretty much everything I came across – that I could assess as ‘independent’ information – said the exact opposite. We should be sending our kids to school and a formal learning environment at a much later age. Especially boys.
We should be advocating for kids to be entering into academics after the age of 7… NOT at 5 or even 4.

It worries me then, to read this statement,

Of 1117 public submissions on the cohort proposal, nearly three-quarters were supportive, including 76 per cent of parents and 80 per cent of teachers.

If you are the parent of a young child, or have friends or family who are one of that 76%, please, please, please do NOT sit back and let this happen without any research on your part. Please, for the sake of your children or grandchildren, nieces or nephews, get people to look at the extensive amount of work done on the developmental process that children go through.

And think about what you want your education system to look like – will we continue to take steps towards following the high-performing Asian model of stress-filled academics that can burn children out, or will we follow the integrated yet high performing Finnish model which allows for developmentally appropriate learning and plenty of free time to bed in all that knowledge acquisition.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers which option I think would serve our country’s children best.

At what point did it become acceptable to stress out and measure every aspect of our kids? When did we stop thinking about them as kids and start thinking of them as vessels that need to be ‘filled with education’ so that they are ‘prepared for the real world’?

If you have kids in school, the only time they’re actually in the real world is when they’re out at the grocery shop helping you pick stuff off the shelf. School is not real life. It isn’t even a work-like environment, unless all of your colleagues come from the same socio-economic group, your very local neighbourhood and share your birth year. Please do us all a favour and disabuse anyone who suggests it ‘prepares them for the real world’.

School isn’t a bad thing. Kids need to learn, and not everyone is able to or wants to educate them at home. That is totally fine. There are fabulous teachers out there who do a great job of it. For them to do a great job though, requires they have kids in their classrooms for whom the work is developmentally appropriate and who are physically and emotionally ready for the experience. The more we squeeze the starting age lower, the less we are listening to the ‘experts’ understanding of what goes on with our children’s brains, bodies and emotions.

FOMO on behalf of our kids’ early educational attainment and their future is going to create a new generation of Millenials, only this group won’t be the all about me generation, they’ll be the anxiety ridden, never feeling like they are smart enough generation. All that testing, grading, ranking and comparing to others will do wonders for their self-esteem… won’t it?

Yeah, right!

Here is the link to the Stuff article that inspired this part rant, part plea.