Homeschooling with Quantum!

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 15 October 2023…

Hey Y’all!

Good evening and happy Sunday from Free Missouri! The bottom pic is for Fast-Jet-Friday! It's the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle flying low in Wales last week. You guys know I love the pics where the jet is ripping the moisture out of the air! The cool weather continues and we’ve had a couple of days of misty rain, not much but we’ll take it. The animals are doing well with a couple of highlights. The top pic is me rewarding Nala for her conquest. She and Missy took care of two raccoons last night and got all of the pets and praise for their great work. The other highlight is that we loaded the remaining 5 hogs for their trip to the processor tomorrow morning. They remembered the trailer from when we loaded the last 5 so when we put their food in it this evening, they just went in to eat and we shut the door. It was one of our easiest hog loading episodes. The next 3 pics are them in the trailer ready for their trip. The following 3 pics are the large ewe flock enjoying a snack. They are all looking good and are getting ready for the rams to join in a couple of weeks. Friday’s big event was hooking up the trailer and going to get our GMO-free feed. We got a ton of lamb feed, a ton of piglet feed, and a half ton of beef chicken feed. Saturday was market day and although the foot traffic was light, we had a good day. We enjoyed seeing our regular customers and friends. Today we worked on the side-by-side tuning it up a bit. We changed the oil in the 7.3L Ford and used a bunch of additives that should help it run better. Finally, we loaded the hogs and got the trailer moved from the old truck to the new one for the drive to the processor. Next week is going to be a busy one with the trip to the processor, recording the podcast, and processing about 90 chickens. Should be fun!

I’ve mentioned that we enjoy the freedom in Missouri in a lot of different aspects, one of which is homeschooling. That said, I haven’t talked much about what we do. Makaylah is 11 and we homeschool her, and refuse to put her into public school. Missouri doesn’t require parents to notify the system of their intent to homeschool, unless you are pulling them out of public school. There are no mandatory curriculum requirements, but there are minimal record-keeping requirements—mainly just recording hours spent working on school and the subjects covered. They require you teach Reading, Math, Social Studies, Language Arts, and, in high school, Science, History, Civics, Literature, and U.S. and Missouri Constitutions. There are no required teacher qualifications and no standardized testing requirement. We use a curriculum called Master Books for her main subjects. It is a Christian-based curriculum that we really like. Friday, Makaylah finished with her schoolwork quickly and was hanging out with Shelley and I as we snapped beans for the freezer and processed tomatoes and peppers for canning. Shelley handed her the MacBook and set it up for her to engage with ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot. Shelley asked her to work with ChatGPT to summarize the things she learned over the past week. Not terribly excited about this “extracurricular” activity, she began. First, it was a great exercise for her to practice typing. Next, she started with her Science lessons where she learned about weather and weather phenomena. We asked her to read us the prompt she used to communicate with ChatGPT and then read the reply. Fairly quickly, she and GPT had done a really good job at summarizing the things she had learned. Sensing an opportunity, I asked her to continue her engagement by asking GPT how weather forecasting might change in the future with the addition of Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing, but explain everything as if it was talking to a 12 year old…because it was. And it began! We spent the next hour discovering and imagining the future. She learned about many aspects of Quantum Computing, Quantum Physics, and the differences from Newtonian Physics. She absolutely loved it! We all learned a lot and had a great time. Shelley’s comment was that we are living a modern traditional life as we preserved the vegetables from our garden while using satellite internet to learn about Quantum Computing from an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot. I have to agree. I’m not sure what the other kids her age were learning in school last Friday, but I bet it wasn’t that!

Local Farm Report for 13 & 14 October 2023

Harvest:

22 Chicken eggs

8 Duck eggs

6 1/2 Gallons of milk

Cheers!

Psycho & Shelley