Month: October 2013

09:41 – Al was moved to a regular room yesterday. Frances called yesterday to tell Barbara that Al’s temperature was a bit elevated. They’re keeping an eye on that, obviously, but haven’t moved him back to ICU. We’re hoping that Al will be released later this week and can return home to recuperate.

I have the first-draft design of the earth science kit pretty much complete. That is, I pretty much know what’s going into the kit and have enough of those items either on hand or on order to build a prototype and an initial batch of 30 kits. Items may be added or deleted as I actually write and test the lab sessions, but at least I have a starting point.

One of the items that’ll be on the “You Provide” list is a tub of Crayola Air-Dry Clay, which is widely available locally and on-line. Among other things, that’ll be used to make a 3D landscape model for a lab session on topographical mapping. At least, I think it will. I need to do some testing first, not least to make sure that the clay model, once dried and hardened, will remain hardened if it’s reimmersed in water.

So I asked Barbara to put a tub of the stuff on her shopping list for the next time she goes to Wal-Mart. She informed me that she’s no longer going to Wal-Mart unless she absolutely needs to for something no one else carries. She’s boycotting Wal-Mart, which is fine with me. I don’t like how they do business, and I’d as soon not buy from them. Barbara says she now goes to Target instead. No problem. Target also carries the Crayola Air-Dry Clay, and I’d much rather buy from them.

The last week or so has been pretty chilly for around here. One day, the high was only 50F (10C) and the low was 28F (-2C). But it appears that Native American Summer has arrived. For the next week or so, we’re to have highs in the upper 60’s to mid-70’s and lows in the upper 40’s to lower 60’s. Still, it’s time to make sure the natural gas logs in the den are clean, tested, and ready to go. Every year, I have to use canned air to blow out the tube in the oxygen-depletion sensor. Even the tiniest bit of dust plugs it and cuts off gas to the pilot light. Unless that pilot light is burning, the bimetal strip it heats won’t allow gas to flow to the burners.

10:26 – Things are kind of peaceful around here. Back during the craziness in August we were routinely shipping four or five kits a day, and some days as many as a dozen. Even though we had plenty of subassemblies queued up, just boxing up and shipping kits kept things kind of hectic. Things have calmed down now. We might ship one or two kits a day, and some days none at all. I think the biggest day we’ve had this month we shipped only three kits.

The good thing about that is that it gives me time to work on the earth science kit, not to mention administrative stuff that I’ve been letting slide. For example, as I was making up kits yesterday I opened our next-to-last case of 100 goggles and noticed that we’re now down to about 150 thermometers. I’d been meaning to re-order, but this morning I finally took the time to get 200 more goggles and 350 more thermometers on order.

I spent some time on the phone yesterday with a guy who teaches an on-line chemistry course at a large community college. He’d been building chemistry kits for students, but said that it had become just too much work. As I said, tell me about it. So, starting with the January 2014 semester, they want to start ordering our chemistry kits, probably 30 kits to start and then 30+ every semester after that. This is starting to become a regular thing, and I’m thinking we might need to shift our focus from only homeschoolers/hobbyists to meet the needs of public and private schools and colleges. I can easily foresee getting to the point where we’re shipping hundreds or even thousands of kits in bulk orders to such institutions.

10:01 – Until now, we’ve been tracking sales both as unit sales and revenue, but I think we may bag the unit sales aspect and just track revenues. When I was analyzing 2013 versus 2012 sales yesterday, I noticed something odd. We were selling more kits in October 2012 than we are this month, but revenues this month are noticeably higher. As it turns out, that’s because we introduced the prepared slide sets last October and a lot of people ordered them alone. In fact, about 1/3 of our unit sales in October 2012 were for just a slide set. That’s why the average revenue per kit for October 2012 was only about $132, versus about $200 this October. Back in January, I changed the way I counted kits. Instead of recording one $52 slide set as a unit sale, I started grouping stuff, such as recording every four slide sets as one unit sale. Obviously, that cuts down this year’s unit sales numbers noticeably. But on a YTD revenue basis, we’re holding at just a bit under twice last year’s sales, which is what really matters.

Most of our increase in 2012 to 2013 revenues has been a result of having additional types of kits available. If we’re going to maintain a year-on-year doubling of revenues in 2014, we’re going to need more types of kits. That’s why I’m working hard right now to get the Earth Science kit ready to go.

12:24 – I was talking to Kim about the latest school shooting, tying it in with what she’d told me earlier about bullying in local schools. Jasmine attended Mount Tabor high school which is one of the “good” local schools. From what Kim said, even there bullying is rampant. Jas wasn’t victimized badly compared to some, but Kim said she “had her moments” of being harrassed by “mean girls”. Fortunately for her, Jas was popular and well-liked so she sufferred much less than many students.

Much though many “educators” try to deny it, boys are not girls and cannot be turned into girls. Boys have Y chromosomes and testosterone. No matter how much they have been “socialized” and drugged-up on prescription pharmaceuticals, boys are genetically warriors. When a girl is pushed too far, she may fight back physically, but she’s liable just to give up and kill herself. When a boy is pushed too far, there’s a real danger that he will arm himself and go berserk, in the original sense of that word. Note that school shooters are boys, not girls.

Unfortunately, I see no way to fix this problem. Doing so would require big changes to society in general and public schools in particular. Those changes aren’t going to happen, so the discussion centers around useless measures such as how to keep guns out of the hands of would-be berserkers, which isn’t going to happen, or how to secure sites that are not securable. I see no future for public schools. Political considerations have made them nearly useless at their putative tasks. Public schools are losing the bright kids in droves, as their parents abandon public schools for private schools and home-schooling. The ratio of kids on the left side of the bell curve to those on the right enrolled in public schools has skyrocketed just in the last ten years, and the departure of the best and brightest continues to accelerate. Before much longer, the overwhelming majority of kids enrolled in public schools will be those whose parents are too stupid or lazy to care.

The way out of this mess is to let the traditional public schools collapse of their own weight. Public schooling has come to be considered a right. North Carolina, for example, enshrines that right in its Constitution. But, although the Constitution says the state has to provide an education to all children, it’s silent on how to provide that education. Nothing requires that the government operate the schools. North Carolina could go to a 100% voucher-based system. Let the public schools compete head-on with private schools and home schools. Let the vouchers be paid for by having state and federal funding belong to each student, to be spent how and where the parents choose. When a public school loses a student, it also loses the funding for that student. As always, the free market will allocate resources immensely better than any government bureaucracy.