Liberty Lyceum Gifted Homeschooling

Coursera and the World of MOOCs

2012-09-24T13:34:00.002-07:00

Today a new batch of courses from Coursera started, and many thousands of people from countries all over the world are enrolled in them. I enrolled in "Writing in the Sciences," which has 20,000 students; my daughter enrolled in "Greek and Roman Mythology," which has 50,000 students. These large numbers are why these courses are called "Massively Open Online Courses," or MOOCs.

A lot of attention is being paid to the model(s) of these new courses. The latest Stanford Magazine for alumni describes the ongoing evolution of Coursera, which was started by two Stanford professors, in an article called "Stanford for All." The Chronicle of Higher Education asks "Can MOOCs Help Sell Textbooks?" as it points out that publishers see the large number of students enrolled in such courses as a big opportunity. In addition, the courses attract many international students, which can represent a new market for publishers. But as the Chronicle's article points out, one company, Flat World Knowledge, is already complementing some free courses with free and open college textbooks, including one text that's required for an edX course starting in October. Coursera has asked that instructors not require textbook purchases for their courses, although instructors point out that any complete course will require reading as well as listening to lectures.

For those who are just beginning to take a look at the learning opportunities of MOOCs, The Chronicle has put together an entire Web section called "What You Need to Know About MOOCs," with an overview and links to all their coverage of this phenomenon so far. We can surely expect their Web collection to grow substantially this year, with the intense worldwide interest in such courses.

Coming - Integration of Free Online Courses with Traditional Degrees

2012-06-21T06:31:00.001-07:00

The higher education world is beginning to respond to the increasing availability of online learning opportunities, free and otherwise. This is good news for those of us homeschooling!

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Online Degree Program Lets Students Test out of What They Already Know," describes how the University of Wisconsin is creating a program in which adults who may have some work experience can combine units from such testing with online courses from UW to attain college degrees.

The chancellor of University of Wisconsin Colleges, Raymond Cross, is quoted as saying,"We’re trying to find ways to reduce the cost of education. Implicit in the model is the idea that you can take lectures online from free sources—like Khan Academy and MITx—and prepare yourself for the competency test. Then take the remaining courses online at UW.”

This is really exciting. Although they are aiming this new program at adults who have dropped out of the college track, imagine the possibilities for our homeschooled kids in the future, as more such programs are developed. If they can soak up knowledge from whatever sources -- TED videos and the free courses mentioned above, for example -- and then take competency-based tests for college credit, that will provide a great asset, especially for our advanced younger students. Not only will they save money on courses, but they can get an early start on accumulating credits online.

Homeschooling as an Umbrella Program for High School

2012-06-12T09:12:00.001-07:00

Homeschooling is different for us now that my daughter is technically a high school student. These days her learning and her coursework come from a variety of different sources. She is a homeschooler in the "umbrella" sense. We have a private school here in California in which she is the only student (we homeschool through "the private school option"), and within that framework, she takes online classes, community college courses, and private lessons, and self-studies material. All of her credits are accumulated on her high school transcript, from our private school (home school).

Even in the earlier years, we were unusual in our community for how much she and I pursued learning on our own. Many families within homeschooling communities seem to avail themselves more of online courses and group homeschool classes from the start. Partly because I had teaching experience and love learning myself, and partly because my daughter was impatient with other kids "fooling around" during what should be class time, we found it easiest to just pursue material on our own. But when she was 12, my daughter began to want more independence from me; that's when she started her first community college class. During the past 3 years, there has been a transition away from my being the primary teacher, with her taking more courses from outside sources. Right now I'm finishing up the last formal course I will facilitate for her (teach her), a math course.

What, then, will she do for the rest of high school? Like many homeschooled high school students in California, she will accumulate many credits from a community college. We are lucky that the college she attends part-time is one of the best in California, with a top transfer rate to universities (so more of the students are on the university track rather than in vocational programs). She is in the honors program as well, which provides more challenging courses for those who need them. Although the higher education system in California is under great stress right now, and we have seen her tuition rise each year since she started part-time attendance, there is still an opportunity for her to complete some excellent courses at a fairly low cost.

She has also pursued online courses through CTY, Lukeion, and this fall, Lone Pine Classical School. For the first time this fall, she'll also be taking a free online course through Coursera, the new company developed by Stanford professors which I wrote about here earlier. Although there are no credits given through Coursera, I can give her credit for the course on our home school transcript. Just as with courses I have facilitated/taught for her, it will receive only an "S" grade for "Satisfactory," with her GPA (grade-point average) coming only from her college courses and other outside sources.

To complement her Coursera humanities course, I put together an online discussion group, recruiting 12 other homeschooled teenagers who will also be taking the course. The online tools for this study group/discussion group are a private Google site, with links to the Coursera course materials, books on the reading list, etc.; a Google group for a mailing list; and Google + hangouts for real-time discussions among students in different parts of the country (and two of them are in India!). Now that I have set it up, it will be up to my daughter to lead discussions and get the group going. This is the way Coursera works -- they expect students to set up their own independent study groups, using whatever tools are available to them. In the game theory course I took through Coursera this spring, with 60,000 students enrolled worldwide, I was in two Facebook study groups, one Google + hangout group, and corresponded with some students via email. That experience helped me to know what my daughter would need for a successful study group for her course.

Because Miss C is interested in performing arts, we consider her private lessons and her theater classes to be part of her high school education, and not just "extracurricular." We feel that she attends a "performing arts high school," with courses obtained a la carte from different sources, including her private teachers.

Finally, there is testing. When I talk to people outside the homeschooling world, they no longer ask "What about socialization?" as they did when my daughter was young. Now it is testing and college admissions they worry about. So yes, my daughter will take some complement of AP and SAT subject tests (SAT II tests) to "back up" the value of her homeschool and community college coursework. When she took an AP test at a high school this spring, her main comments about the experience concerned the disrespectful way the proctors ordered the students around. I'm glad that kind of disrespect will be minimal for her. Because she took the SAT for a talent search at age 11, the whole testing experience is somewhat demystified for us. So, she'll take tests. Ho-hum.

My post yesterday marking ten years of homeschooling was in a way also marking a transition from our more homegrown homeschooling days to those more centered on the outside world. Luckily for me, I'll still get to talk with my daughter about all she is doing, and therefore be a warm support for her, under our umbrella.

Ten Years of Homeschooling, and Counting

2012-06-11T08:50:00.001-07:00

Today I'm in a reflective mood and yet excited about the future. My daughter has just turned 15, which also marks ten years of homeschooling for us. We started officially calling ourselves homeschoolers when she turned 5, with her having just finished up two years of Montessori preschool. How many teachers or schools see their students mature from age 5 to age 15? And we aren't finished yet!

That first summer was lovely. For the whole month of August, I kept two other preschool friends of hers, a girl and a boy, five days per week, for our own "summer camp," which we called "Camp Mount Davidson." I thought it would help my daughter make the transition to homeschooling, in which she would presumably have fewer other children around than she'd had during preschool. We had a lot of fun with Camp Mt. Davidson. We went on nature walks and the kids played freely in the house. We took field trips, including one to my husband's office, affiliated with CBS, where the three kids were interviewed on camera (love the video of that). I remember the three kids in the back seat of the car, and listening to them argue food politics when we drove by a McDonald's. Two of the kids, including my daughter, thought McDonald's was terrible and would never eat there. The other child was a big McDonald's fan. That was a great conversation to hear.

I've tried to listen, to such conversations as well as to my daughter's comments to me, and not just talk to her through the years. I believe our conversations have been a crucial part of my daughter's development and education. Not only have they helped her build vocabulary and critical thinking, and given her an opportunity to develop her oral expression, but – what luxury for a child, to have an intelligent person available to listen to what she had to say, when she wanted to say it. To me, it would have been tragic for her to instead have sat in a classroom with 30 other kids, waiting for the opportunity to raise her hand.

In ten years, we've been through many different stages in our homeschooling. At first we mostly unschooled, because she was so busy with self-initiated projects. Why would I interfere with that and assign her something to do? The thing I remember most vividly about her "kindergarten" year was her reading. She read for hours each day, and seemingly couldn't get enough. It was wonderful. This was such a change from preschool, in which she mainly loved to work with the Montessori math manipulatives! Having read a lot of Maria Montessori, I felt we were continuing with her philosophy as expressed in The Absorbent Mind: that when the child is developmentally ready for particular material, learning is effortless. Let them do what they are compelled to do, because that is what is developmentally "hot" for them at the moment. She "needed" to work with math when she was 3 and 4 and she "needed" to read a lot when she was 5. Following her natural rhythms always seemed like the completely obvious thing to do.

There have been so many wonderful highlights through the years. Studying Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet together when she was 7, we read the play, practiced soliloquies, watched the Zeffirelli movie, watched a video of the Rudolf Nureyev ballet, listened to the Prokofiev music for the ballet, and then attended the San Francisco Ballet performance of the same. That strategy has served us well over the years – reading, discussing, approaching material from several different vantage points -- immersing. Always preparing for major performances or events by learning about them ahead of time, especially through reading and discussing original works.

Yesterday, I was amused to hear my daughter complaining about people who don't prepare for such events. She had attended "Odyssey on Angel Island," an interactive performance in San Francisco Bay based on the events in Homer's Odyssey. We had read and discussed Homer's work, and The Odyssey is on the reading list for a "Greek and Roman Mythology" course she'll be taking this fall. Apparently some of the comments at the performance, made by those who didn't know it well, put her off. "They could at least have read the Wikipedia page!" she exclaimed. Yes, I believe she'll be immersing in all of her major experiences going forward, even without me.

When she was younger, I assumed she would go away to college early, at least by age 16, as I did. However, we've been able to make her home life and education very enriched, thanks to community college classes and the wonderful theater and music community in San Francisco. She wants to stay here until she turns 18, and then pursue a university education. She'll be able to take a bunch of college credits with her, and lucky me, I have three more years to watch a homeschooled girl explore all the possibilities, as she matures into a well prepared young adult. How exciting!

Summer Residential Theater Camps/Programs for High School Students

2012-06-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

I've expanded and updated my Google doc (spreadsheet), "Summer Residential Theater Camps/Programs for High School Students." If you have a teenager who is serious about theater and interested in pursuing university or other pre-professional theater programs during summers, this document is the resource for you. I will be maintaining this document for the next three years or so, so let me know if there are other camps or programs along the same lines that should be included -- send me a note at info@libertylyceum.org.

Jonah Lehrer on How Creativity Works

2012-04-05T06:36:00.021-07:00

I attended an intriguing talk this week by Jonah Lehrer, author of the new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works (and of the earlier Proust Was a Neuroscientist). Lehrer, a contributor to Wired and my beloved Radiolab as well as more mainstream publications, writes about the intersection of science and culture in a very accessible and insightful way.

His talk was engaging, and it really was more of a "talk" than the interview it was supposed to be. Lehrer simply had so much to say in response to every prompting question. He had a lot to say about topics in the book, and his answers to audience questions were wide-ranging. I found his comments describing the historical connection between investment in education and "an age of excess genius" to be particularly relevant, as well as his points about those with ADD and ADHD having great capacities for creativity -- if they aren't forced to focus and pay attention narrowly all the time, as is generally done in schools.

I finished Imagine this morning and enjoyed it very much. Lehrer connects recent findings in neuroscience research with examples of creative "epiphanies" by various people -- Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs, Yo-Yo Ma, and others less famous from the worlds of business, graphic design, and scientific research. By learning from their examples and understanding the science behind these examples, he shows us, we can structure our own time to allow for more creative output.

Lehrer discusses how focusing closely on analytical work heavily incorporates left-brain circuitry. Although some kinds of work require such intense concentration, when we are focused that way, it's almost impossible to get creative, innovative ideas, because these occur when the mind is wandering, free to connect seemingly unrelated ideas from different fields. Even in science and mathematics, which typically rely on analytical thinking, breakthroughs tend to come when the right side of the brain is in gear (think of Albert Einstein's observation, "Imagination is more important than knowledge.") Although we might have known this intuitively for some time, Lehrer connects this idea to the results of specific experiments, for example, tracking the activity of individual neurons as well as overall regions of the brain in monkeys as they solve creative problems. There are also plenty of examples of experiments with human subjects.

Yet creativity is more complex than just flashes of insight. Those initial innovative ideas must be followed by a lot of hard work to refine them, and that's where focus and "grit" (as measured by Angela Duckworth's "grit survey") come in, calling on the prefrontal cortex to "help direct the spotlight of attention" and maintain persistence over extended work on a solution. That only works if you have lots of dopamine encouraging you to stay with it. You must find pleasure in something to stick with it. Again, an intuitive concept, but now we have an understanding of the neurotransmitter action to back it up.

The problem is, how do you know which kind of creative work is needed at a given time? As Lehrer asks in the book, "How does anyone know when to listen to the prefrontal cortex instead of unleashing the right hemisphere?" He answers that question by telling us that we are actually pretty good at diagnosing this, having "feelings of knowing" that tell us we can find the answer if we just keep thinking about it. Without those, it's time to take a break, go take a walk, to do anything to let our minds shift into daydreaming and unfocused thought. Of course, many adults have the freedom to switch gears this way if needed, but children in schools don't. The connections Lehrer presents seem strong evidence for letting children find their own natural rhythms, as well as adults.

In taking us through the process of "letting go," allowing the creative juices to flow (and neurons to fire), Lehrer describes jazz musicians hooked up to an fMRI machine while they are improvising. First, there is a surge of activity in the prefrontal cortex, starting the "storytelling" process. Then, the part of the brain that inhibits us, allows us self-control, is de-activated. Then the inferior frontal gyrus, closely associated with language and speech, is activated as new notes are created. But like language, successful improvisation only works when there is articulate knowledge of musical phrasing to draw upon. Later, Lehrer shows how something similar happens with a champion surfer taking on huge waves and with comedians learning to improvise at Second City. I loved this line: "The lesson of letting go is that we constrain our own creativity."

Another juicy plum discussed in the book is "outsider thinking" (a favorite of mine, since I love the Pablo Picasso quote, "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it"). He takes us through the story of Innocentive, a Web site through which Fortune 500 companies with budgets in the billions outsource their hardest problems to anyone who wishes to take them on, for a prize -- and get brilliant solutions in return. Favorite line in this section: "The world is full of natural outsiders, except that we don't call them outsiders; we refer to them as young people."

In the second part of the book, Lehrer switches from individual creativity to collaboration, how we are creative (or not) together. I can't help but agree that cities are hotbeds of creativity (I love living in San Francisco) as Lehrer demonstrates via both social research and data-driven analyses. It was also fun to read about why Silicon Valley overtook Route 128 in Massachusetts as the technology center of our country. It has to do with social networks and how interconnected people from different disciplines may be.

Perhaps most important in the social chapters for those of us homeschooling our children is "The Shakespeare Paradox," in which Lehrer explains the concept of an "age of excess genius." In Ancient Greece, during Shakespeare's time, and at other places and times in history, there has been a flowering of creativity that was caused by the proximity of geniuses to each other, and their interactions with each other, as well as an investment in education. He also discusses the importance of combinatorial creativity, something at which Shakespeare excelled. According to Lehrer, rather than protecting our ideas, we should share them, because when we do, he quotes a researcher, "They multiply." And happily, he shares the importance of play to children in developing not only creativity but also other aspects of cognitive ability. And we learn about an innovative school where the students create all day.

Here is Lehrer's voiceover promoting the book through an entertaining animated video by Flash Rosenberg (thanks, Brain Pickings).

For more on his thoughts before reading the book, here is his piece in the Wall Street Journal that discusses some ideas from the book (business-oriented ones, of course), and The New York Times review of the book.

New "Interest" List on Facebook: Gifted Homeschooling in San Francisco

2012-03-27T11:18:00.003-07:00

Facebook has a new feature, Interest Lists, in which you can collect the newsfeeds of all the pages you follow related to a certain topic in one list. What's more, you can allow others to subscribe to your lists, and you can subscribe to theirs. I've started a new interest list there, Gifted Homeschooling in San Francisco, to which you can subscribe when you're logged into Facebook.

This list currently includes 112 pages I follow on Facebook that are in some way related to gifted homeschooling. There are lots of science pages, as well as specifically gifted issues pages, like Hoagies' Gifted Education, etc. Because we live in San Francisco, there are also many San Francisco and Bay Area resources, from museums to theater companies.

I've also started a Facebook page to complement this blog, at Liberty Lyceum. There I will post links to new blog posts here, as well as add brief items not posted here.

If you decide to subscribe to the interest list, and/or Like the Liberty Lyceum page, I hope you find them useful!

Exploring Online Courses - A Continuation

2012-03-20T19:49:00.007-07:00

The free Game Theory class I'm taking online through Stanford (described previously here) has started, and it is turning out to be a very interesting experience. There are supposedly over 10,000 students in the class, and I kept track of the countries people were from (besides the U.S.) in the first 287 introductions on our discussion board:

India, Russia, Pakistan, Armenia, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Romania, Australia, Malaysia, Germany, China, Uganda, Korea, Belgium, Japan, Lebanon, Portugal, England, Phillippines, "bankrupt Greece," Ukraine, Poland, Serbia, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Mexico, Iran, Singapore, Czech Republic, South Africa, Chile, Brazil, Brunei, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Turkey, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ecuador, Trinidad, Indonesia, France, Puerto Rico, Canada, Israel, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, and Peru.

I think this is so wonderful. I have joined two Facebook study groups (one organized by a fellow in India) through the course and one that has Google+ hangouts. The Google+ hangout is organized by a Google employee who is taking the course. She calls our group "Game Theory Ninjas in Training."

Right away it was clear that some people taking the course already know lots about game theory and are just taking the course to talk to other people about it. One person has collected 160 gigabytes of files related to game theory over the years, pdfs and so on. People are sharing many sites, other courses, just amazing amounts of information. I'll post more here about the course as it progresses.

Meanwhile, in other online course news, I note that someone has just launched a page, Class Central, to keep track of all the courses offered through Stanford's Coursera, MIT, MITx, and Udacity. With regard to Game Theory specifically, someone shared GameTheory.net, which has an amazing collection of resources from across all the online courses on the topic offered by everyone.

In the K-12 course space, there was an interesting blog post today by Anne Stevens, a teacher in Northwestern University's CTD (Center for Talent Development) program for gifted kids, which offers online courses. In her post, "Hey, Lady, You're Blocking My View: Reflections of a Classroom Teacher Moving Online," she wisely notes that software she used at first was not preferred by students, and she made changes. She also discusses that to succeed, online learning must be very interactive, broken up into smaller sections; you can't just have a long PowerPoint anymore. She feels that the course itself should be asynchronous (everyone does not have to go through it at the same real time), but interactions between students should be synchronous. She therefore advocates a "flipped classroom" just as Stanford is beginning to do for its enrolled students, not just for this free course: lectures are watched on your own time, online; precious interactive time with other students and the teacher are synchronous, held at a certain time. Nice insights and appreciation of the importance of flexibility, Ms. Stevens.

In the Game Theory class I'm taking, the synchronous time is only with other students, and it is broken up into smaller study groups that we organize on our own, through the course's central discussion board. That's where I connected to the Facebook groups and the Google+ group. I will have to agree with Ms. Stevens that this interactivity is an excellent complement to the recorded course materials, which each of us can watch early in the morning, on our lunch breaks, or late at night, according to our individual preferences.

Listen and Learn from Neil deGrasse Tyson

2012-03-15T09:47:00.003-07:00

I've ordered Neil deGrasse Tyson's new book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier. Meanwhile, I've been enjoying watching his rounds to promote it, even in a silly way, such as on "The Daily Show." His message that we must invest in space exploration now to be at all ready for our future here on earth is very compelling. Here is his column in Foreign Affairs, "The Case for Space: Why We Should Keep Reaching for the Stars," which includes a 10-minute video clip of him discussing the topic, in which he wants us to "take audacious steps" in which we will "transform the culture" and "transform the economy" because "innovations in science and technology have been the drivers, the engines, of economic growth ever since the Industrial Revolution."

In his article, after explaining China's ascendancy in space exploration during the past decade, Tyson lays out the pitiful "decline of science" in the U.S. generally. "For example, in recent decades, the rate of U.S. submissions to peer-reviewed science journals has dropped or barely held steady, while the rates of submissions from Brazil, China, Japan, and western Europe have risen sharply. Data on graduate-level education tell a similar story. According to the latest available annual census by the National Science Foundation, nearly one-third of the graduate students in science and engineering fields in the United States and more than half of the postdoctoral researchers in those fields are foreign nationals studying or working in the country on temporary visas. Moreover, those numbers partly cloak the fact that in some of the nation’s best engineering departments, almost all the students are foreign nationals."

How can we say we are serious about pursuing the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) if we don't do as this brilliant man says?

Looking forward to exploring Space Chronicles. I hope many more do, and put some pressure on our government to prepare us for the future.

Trying Out the Future: Free Online College Courses

2012-03-13T05:44:00.017-07:00

This year, open courseware online seems to be taking some big steps toward its next generation. At the scrappy, independent level there is Khan Academy (although now with the endorsement of Bill Gates), with instructional videos on umpty-dozen topics; Open Culture compiles hundreds of free college courses from all over; and at the high end, MIT, which pioneered open courseware online, is working toward the launch of MITx, a more formal offering.

Stanford University is dipping its toe further into the water as well. This spring it is offering several free, online courses by its regular professors, after the success of its initial offerings in computer science.

I've enrolled in one of those courses, Game Theory, a subject about which I know little. The course is taught jointly by two Stanford professors, one in computer science and one in economics. That collaboration is interesting to me in itself! In their introductory video, they announced that they will most likely disagree on certain points throughout the course. How fun. There is a syllabus, video lectures, problem sets, a discussion forum, and a "game theory lab."

I'm taking the course partly because I'm interested in the content, and partly because I'm interested in how higher education will be affected by the growing prevalence and quality of courses like these. Right now, my daughter is taking relatively inexpensive California community college courses as a high school student, but after that, we are looking at the prospect of four years of private university and then grad school. We've always been autodidacts in our family -- homeschooling was a natural outgrowth of that. How will online courses like these compare to in-person courses at universities like Stanford and MIT? Is there a place for them in my daughter's education if she anticipates applying to selective universities?

Back to game theory, I was able to find three other free university courses in the same topic without looking too hard. There is one from the University of Canterbury (but this is video lectures only); there is "Economic Applications of Game Theory" at MIT OpenCourseware with "selected lecture notes, assignments and solutions, and exams and solutions;" and there's a course at Yale with video and audio lectures and a 10MB Zip file of course materials. There may be others. None of these seem to have the interactive component, through the discussion forum and "game theory lab," and real-time course progress (vs. archived course materials) that Stanford offers, however.

For those who may be interested, here is Wikipedia's overview of game theory as a discipline, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's (SEP) information on the field. These are more great free resources, although I have donated to Wikipedia the past two years, and I note the SEP asks for donations as well -- a new model in purchasing our educational materials, perhaps?

After my course in strategic decision making (game theory), I may well have new tools for evaluating where these new free online courses fit into my daughter's education mix.

How not to learn to write, and Stephanie Tolan's "The Deep End"

2012-03-11T10:26:00.017-07:00

Interesting that test-driven education seems to be doing as much damage in the UK as it is here in the U.S. In an article in The Telegraph, "Bright students 'cannot write essays', say Cambridge dons," a history professor at Cambridge "warned that students were 'drilled into writing' in a formulaic manner between the age of 11 and 18, leaving them unable to articulate their ideas on degree courses."

As a person who always feels so sad when a newer homeschooler asks for help in how to get his or her child to write a "5-paragraph essay" (because you can't convince people, usually, that they don't need to do this), I am glad to see this report. My daughter never wrote a single 5-paragraph essay on assignment and now does fine on all types of writing in her community college classes. Such stories always make me appreciate homeschooling, and especially the child-led learning we have used. I also think our emphasis on blank paper (and blank screens) rather than workbooks with fill-in-the-blank assignments helped. How does one learn to create something original if not given the time and space to develop this ability, unencumbered by lame "prompts"?

Stephanie Tolan has started a new Facebook page, "The Deep End," in which she shares both her own thoughts on profoundly gifted students and items in the news which she deems important. I've been a Stephanie Tolan fan since I read a book she co-authored, Guiding the Gifted Child, and her seminal essay, "Is it a Cheetah?," years ago.

My daughter also became a fan first in reading her books for young people, such as Surviving the Applewhites and Welcome to the Ark, and later when she met her at Yunasa, a camp for the highly gifted, where Stephanie is a senior fellow. Neither my daughter or I will forget her checking into Yunasa for the first time, and Stephanie walking up to her and saying her name (first and last) and that she was glad to meet her. This was just from looking at her photo attached to her application, and then Stephanie began to discuss my daughter's essay in that application. Wow! My daughter attended Yunasa for one week in each of four summers, and grew to appreciate Stephanie all the more each year.

Stephanie's new page, The Deep End, gets its name from a story "Where do the mermaids stand?," by Robert Fulghum, about the unique minds and spirits of some children (here is a video version) -- very gifted ones, Stephanie believes. The mermaids "stand" in The Deep End, Stephanie writes, and this page is a place to talk about the unique social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical aspects of the lives of such children.

A New Direction: In the News

2012-03-11T09:45:00.002-07:00

For the first few years of this blog, I wrote about personal issues in homeschooling my gifted daughter. I slacked off during the last couple of years out of respect for her privacy.

Since some of the older content of this blog may still be useful to those who find it through Web searches, I want to keep it here, although I will be including different content going forward. I will probably still include posts about the early college/community college experience from time to time, as well as those about the four-year college search and application process. But mostly I will be including links to what I'm reading online, and comments about it.

I have been sending this type of thing in to my gifted homeschool group mailing list. But the many great items I find, when posted there, can lead me to dominate the list. I also don't want to put this information on my Facebook page, because I have quite a few friends who are not in the gifted homeschooling world, so that doesn't seem appropriate.

We'll see how this experiment works out before I go off on a different tangent!

Book Review: Admission Matters

2011-12-14T17:54:00.000-08:00

Wow, time flies when you're homeschooling a child as fun as my daughter has always been! Although she's now 14 and a freshman in high school, she's also in her third year of taking community college classes part-time. So we've begun the process of looking at the (full-time, 4-year) college admissions process, to make sure we are covering all the bases in her high school curriculum that she'll need for admission to a selective university.

In January, I'll be attending a 6-week class on College Admissions in Stanford University's Continuing Education program. The class meets once weekly and is taught by Jon Reider, who wrote Stanford's original homeschool admissions policy, and who is a co-author of the book Admission Matters: What Students and Parents Need to Know About Getting into College. I've read it and written a review of the book oriented to homeschoolers and posted it here on our Web site. Enjoy! There are several more books on his list, so I'll be sharing more book reviews in the next couple of months.

Spanish Conversation Tutor

2010-12-14T07:15:00.000-08:00

We're very excited to have a new tutor in Spanish conversation. Miss C will be taking Spanish 3 starting in January and we will meet with this tutor once a week for dinner (my idea). There are so many different kinds of Hispanic restaurants in San Francisco, I figured that with once weekly dinners, we'll only visit the best of them in the three months before we leave for Spain.

This tutor is a student at the community college, who intends to be a Spanish professor. She was referred to us by the professor there with whom Miss C and I both studied, separately. We revere this professor and since she endorses this tutor, we are thrilled. Our tutor is actually from Spain, and has lived in Madrid, Seville, and Granada. So we can not only work on our Spanish conversation, but we can talk about Spain, as well as the food!

We are really getting excited about our trip, which begins in late March. We plan to spend five weeks in Spain. I haven't decided whether I'll write about our experiences here, or set up a new blog just for our travels. I'll note it here, either way!

Early College Information & Resources

2010-10-26T08:58:00.001-07:00

For almost two years I've managed a mailing list for San Francisco Bay Area families with kids in early college, usually attending college classes concurrently with homeschooling or high school but sometimes full-time. Now that my daughter has successfully made the transition to attending community college classes, and we're preparing for an extended trip to Europe, I've decided to discontinue the list.

However, I've archived here all the links to information and resources that we collected during the life of the list. It's oriented to the Bay Area, but it also has early college resources that could be helpful nationally.

See my list here: Early College Information & Resources.

The Scottish Play

2010-08-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

Miss C and I saw Cal Shakes' production of "Macbeth" last night, and it was an interesting new take for us, having seen the modern play "Equivocation" at Marin Theatre Company this past spring.

"Equivocation" was written by Shakespeare scholar Bill Cain about the conflict Shakespeare might have experienced in writing a play that would be acceptable to the new King James (no living monarch could be portrayed) in the time of the Gunpowder plot, a Catholic rebellion against the Protestant king. The Catholic Jesuits captured could not lie as that was a sin, but neither did they want to betray their friends. Their facility with language allowed them to "equivocate," not actually lying but in their answers, not revealing the actual truth, either. Shakespeare used equivocation in Macbeth, which he wrote at the time, as well. Although the play was about an earlier Scottish king, it included many parallels to the current situation at the time, but didn't make outright political commentary -- it equivocated.

"All their prophecies are equivocations," Miss C whispered to me last night, as the the weird sisters did their "Double, double, toil and trouble" incantation. She was referring, for example, to their saying Macbeth would not be conquered by any man "born of woman," although we all knew, in the audience, that Macduff was "from his mother's womb untimely ripped" and that he would do Macbeth in.

The witches and ghosts Shakespeare included in Macbeth were a fascination (obsession?) of King James. No wonder they were involved in a rebellious plot against a Scottish king.

Extreme Mammals & Biology

2010-08-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

We're starting on Part 2 of AP Biology here, having completed 850 pages out of the 1275 or so in Campbell's Biology by the end of May this year, when we took a break. We decided not to cram it in, but to extend it to two "school years" so we could do it right, with Miss C taking the AP exam next May.

So today we re-started our biology study with a visit to the California Academy of Science's "Extreme Mammals" exhibit. After years of being Cal Academy members, we finally went during "members-only" hours this morning, and it was great. We were able to soak up every display before the screaming herds arrived, with Miss C doing her usual copious note-taking.

The "extreme" theme was a cute idea. In reality it was just a wonderful exhibit on all the features of mammals, with lots of emphasis on evolutionary developments, but it was interesting to focus on "extreme" representations, from brain size to horns to the biggest and smallest mammals, and so on.

We also finally got to go through the rainforest exhibit. The long lines have previously kept us out, but finally we were there when it was just opening for the day. We loved all the butterflies!

We're also resuming the long video series on Mammals on DVD, which we get from Netflix. On 4 DVDs, it's called The Life of Mammals, hosted by David Attenborough. Very enjoyable.

This is going to be a great part 2 of biology!

Back to Theater

2010-08-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted here. We've had a busy summer of camps and traveling, and now we're finally getting back to "normal" for fall. Instead of a big back-to-school push, for us, that means regular theater-going again.

Last night we saw the 1934 Cole Porter musical "Anything Goes" at Foothill College, where Miss C takes classes. This week we have three more shows: "The Wanderings of Odysseus" at Stanford University; "Macbeth" at California Shakespeare Theater; and "The Pirates of Penzance" at Lamplighters Music Theatre in San Francisco.

It's so nice to be back to normal.

Book: A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth

2010-04-11T07:41:00.001-07:00

I have been intrigued by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, have wanted to know more about her, ever since I read this quotation by her: "In the ordinary elementary school situation, children of 140 IQ waste half of their time. Those above 170 IQ waste practically all of their time" (see article by Kathi Kearney).

Hollingworth's classic book, Children Above 180 IQ, based on a longitudinal study she began in 1916 and continued through the 1920s and 1930s, is practically impossible to find for sale, and when it occasionally becomes available as a used copy, it can be priced around $500 due to its rarity and desirability within the gifted world. It seems to be available only in university libraries in the Bay Area.

The next best thing I could find was a 2002 biography of Hollingworth, available used through Amazon.com. A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth, by Ann G. Klein, was published by Great Potential Press, Inc., which is led by Jim Webb and specializes in gifted education resources. It is wonderful that Great Potential Press brings out the titles it does, but it is alarming to me how quickly such books go out of print. Eight years after this book was published, Hollingworth's work is in as much danger of being forgotten as ever.

Her work was critically important, especially her founding of the field of gifted education. She did other very important work in educational psychology, but her greatest contributions were in establishing that gifted children needed special guidance to reach their potentials, and that there was broad variability in those potentials and in the children's life experiences based on their levels of giftedness.

Hollingworth was considered an eminent scientist in her day. From her post as a professor at Teachers College, part of Columbia University, she conducted research, wrote articles and books, gave many presentations, and guided doctoral students. She started her career doing research to refute the widely held belief that the intelligence of women suffered during their menstrual periods. Her subsequent studies of the variability of human intelligence ranged from subjects with "subnormal" intelligence to those with the highest levels of giftedness. She was a strong opponent of group intelligence testing, asserting that only individualized testing could evaluate "the whole child" and fully ascertain that child's abilities.

Profoundly gifted herself, Hollingworth knew personally of the social and emotional difficulties of children at the highest levels of intelligence. She considered children of IQ 120-155 to be of "optimal intelligence," because they would be able to fit in with many other people in society, but those at higher IQ levels almost always experienced difficulty in "fitting in" due to the extreme differences in their feelings and perceptions of the world, even compared to other gifted children at lower IQs.

Hollingworth advocated that highly gifted children be both accelerated and segregated into programs for the gifted in which they could study more broadly and deeply than the general curriculum allowed. She felt that giftedness was innate but that only if that giftedness was nurtured would society reap the benefits of the optimal contributions of its most capable members.

Author Klein summarizes Hollingworth's assertions to her colleagues as follows, that "(1) human beings, from birth and throughout their lives, differ in all measurable physical and mental traits; (2) differences in mental traits are of a greater range than differences in physical abilities; (3) human variations can be plotted on a bell-curve distribution, and that each individual has a place on that curve that will probably be maintained; and (4) the principles of individual differences apply to the general intelligence trait."

Hollingworth suggested, Klein reports, that unresolved conflicts in America between liberty and equality resulted in major problems in education and in society generally. Because of this unresolved conflict, Hollingworth wrote, there existed "...malice toward excellence. Excellence is hated in America today... Any one whose professional interest has led him much into contact with the education of very gifted children will readily agree with this. The most unpopular request one can make of foundations for the promotion of human welfare is for funds to study or promote the welfare of gifted children."

Although in many ways much progress has been made since Hollingworth's untimely death from cancer in 1939, in many other ways the situation remains alarmingly as she described it then. And especially with the economic crisis our country faces now, we've seen gifted programs to be among the first cut, as if they are extra, as if they are not essential for the population that needs them.

One unfortunate reason Hollingworth may not have been revered through all the years since her death is that she was a eugenicist. She felt that some people were simply superior to others in all ways and that society would be better off if they reproduced more frequently, and "inferior" peoples would reproduce less. Of course, many otherwise important and valuable thinkers shared her opinion at the time. Lewis Terman, who developed the Stanford-Binet intelligence test and identified and studied populations of gifted children in California, was also a eugenicist. So were Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), Theodore Roosevelt, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, and a host of others. That does not make this view acceptable, but the context of the times casts at least a different light upon it. The world had not yet come to know of the atrocities the Nazis committed in the name of this philosophy, or begun its moral awakening about these views and progress toward civil rights for all and a humanity that embraces all humans as precious. We are still working on that, and there are many people in the world who do not yet "get it." Still, it is very disappointing that so great a mind, with such visionary ideas about intelligence and the education of gifted children, was not so great as to see beyond the anti-semitic, racist, and classist views of her time.

Nevertheless, Hollingworth's contributions to our understanding of giftedness were profound, as were her recommendations for educating gifted students. I'm glad I read this book and learned more about this very unusual pioneer of educational psychology.

For those who are interested in longitudinal studies of profoundly gifted children, I highly recommend a more recent book than Hollingworth's, one by Miraca Gross, Exceptionally Gifted Children. Although it is also out of print and used copies are similarly outrageously priced at $190 on Amazon.com, at least they now have a Kindle edition for a mere $46.58. Hopefully more such important books will be made available in electronic editions. We need them.

Homeschooling "High School"

2010-03-28T07:23:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official: We'll be homeschooling until my daughter is ready to leave home for a 4-year college or university.

That was my plan even this past fall. But then my daughter felt she wanted the high school experience, for social reasons, including being part of something larger, being in the theater program, working on the school paper, etc. Because I didn't want to compromise on high-level academics, we applied only to what I considered the two best independent (private) high schools in San Francisco for Fall 2010. And, after 4 months of school visits, applications, taking the SSAT test (standard for private high school admission), interviews, and waiting around for the envelopes...she was wait-listed at both. We only really wanted one of the two schools, so we played the wait-list game for another week, chatting with the admissions director of that school often by phone, and waiting for her call. But in the end, my daughter was not admitted.

We have moped a bit. During recent months, we had to get ourselves psyched up for these schools so that she would be a competitive applicant. Inevitably, then, we feel let down that it didn't work out.

But, at least I tried hard for my daughter, and she knows that. You should see the "Transcript & Homeschool Record" I created for her. It's beautiful, and thorough, and I believe that what she has done over 8 years of homeschooling is very impressive. I'll chalk up the huge effort it took me to create it as good training for the real thing: a transcript that will get her into the 4-year college of her choice.

In many ways, that will be much easier. She hasn't yet turned 13, and she's already completed two community college courses with As and will soon complete a third. We have plans for AP tests and SAT II tests, and with those and a bunch of community college credits, there will be plenty of traditional material to put on a high school transcript. Of course, the parts I will cherish will be all of her out-of-the-box activities and achievements. She'll have to talk about all that in her essays.

There is no question that her being one year younger than "normal" for high school age has to have been a factor in her not being accepted. But she is so ready for this level of work. How ironic that she's been able to take community college classes the year she has been 12, and done well in them, but could be seen as too young for high school.

One of the great things about homeschooling, especially if you do it "independently" here in California (by filing a Private School Affidavit, rather than using a charter school program), is that you can accelerate your child as much as you want, as much as is appropriate for him or her. That is what we have done all along, and it has been wonderful. The only difficulties have been in trying to plug her back into supplementary programs that are based on grade levels, and on age levels. Still, we've been able to navigate it all pretty well, most often enrolling her at accelerated levels. Because she is socially mature, that's truly where she fits best, in every respect.

The academic parts of the years ahead look pretty easy to me. My daughter loves being a student and is now really good at managing her schedule and work. And, she's extremely intellectually curious, interested in almost everything. It's a joy to watch her absorbing so much information and being the active learner she has always been, now at such a mature level.

But the social aspects will be daunting. Homeschoolers scoff at the frequent question of outsiders, "What about socialization?" We don't think the questioners actually know the meaning of that word. It's not the noun form of the verb "to socialize" in the sense of "to spend time with friends." It is what is done to a child, not what the child does on her own. My daughter is extremely well "socialized" at this point -- I can take her anywhere (grin). But, having a critical mass of peers for "socializing" is tough. Our plan going forward will involve more arts and theater programs where she can meet others who share her interests.

And, we'll spend more time looking ahead to college. In a couple weeks, we'll take a trip to New York and visit NYU and Columbia (and Barnard, I guess), and see a performance at each university. Oh, yeah, and there's some fun for me, too: We'll be seeing Denzel in August Wilson's "Fences." Ahhhh.

Book: Living with Intensity

2010-03-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

I really enjoyed reading and studying the book, Living with Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults, edited by Susan Daniels and Michael Piechowski. I say "studying" because although it's well written, for me it wasn't just a quick read. Many passages gave me great pause, and I found myself reading them three or four times before moving on.

This book is a compilation of pieces by a group of experts in the social and emotional aspects of giftedness. More specifically, it is a treatment of the gifted experience through the lens of Kazimierz Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration, a theory of personality widely accepted as particularly relevant to gifted people. The "intensity" of the title can be expressed in several ways, categories discussed by Dabrowski as "overexcitabilities."

Actually, the word "overexcitabilities" is frequently labeled a misnomer, a poor translation from the original Polish in which Dabrowski wrote. It is often said that "superexcitabilities" would be a better term, without the "too much" implied by the word "over" in English. Yet "too much" is how many gifted people have heard themselves described all their lives. Such people surely have extreme sensitivities, or overexcitabilities, in one or more of the areas Dabrowski described: intellectual, psychomotor, sensual, imaginational, and emotional. Sometimes spiritual overexcitability is also included in the perspectives of professionals who study this theory and its implications for gifted childen, adolescents, and adults.

Dabrowki's theory includes much more than the observation and description of overexcitabilities of highly gifted people. His Theory of Positive Disintegration describes human developmental potential and the process through which that development may take place in people who have the capacity for advanced development. I haven't read Dabrowski and few lay people have; the concepts as I understand them are difficult to fully comprehend, although one can get an overview from a Web site devoted to his theory. A great value of this book, Living with Intensity, is that it helps explain Dabrowski's ideas and shows why many gifted professionals today find them extremely relevant to understanding what makes gifted people tick.

That is, giftedness is so much more than advanced intellectual abilities (that would be intellectual intensity or overexcitability in Dabrowskian terms). In the person with an increased capacity for intellectual ability, one frequently finds other overexcitabilities or intensities. This is the "more" child, more of everything -- emotionally intense, extremely imaginative, highly sensual (for both good and bad), and very driven and often physically active (psychomotor intensity). Not all children have all these overexcitabilities together, but frequently two or three may be very evident in a highly gifted child. And, setting aside the nature vs. nurture debate about giftedness for now, Dabrowski considered these traits, when an individual has them, to be "original equipment."

Another great insight this book offers is that this original equipment doesn't go away as the child matures into adolescence and then adulthood. Adults continue to have these intensities and they affect everything about their lives, in their chronological life phases as well as in advanced personality development, which doesn't necessarily correspond to chronological age.

Despite ten years of studying giftedness on behalf of my daughter, I found new insights into myself through reading this book. I realized that almost everything I have read previously concerned gifted children. Although other readings reminded me of many experiences of my childhood, this book has presented me to myself as an adult and shown me what may lie ahead. The "lifespan intensity" sections of this book were the most riveting and eye-opening to me.

Just as important to me, however, was the excellent section on adolescence, as my daughter nears 13. I strongly related to the discussion that some highly gifted children (my daughter was one of them) experience "adolescent" issues at ages as young as 8 or 9. It made sense to me then: Why should a child so advanced intellectually not be years ahead socially and emotionally as well, even if the world still sees her small body? Even so, this book confirmed for me and reassured me that her inner experience is what it is, even if that is completely different from what most young people her age experience.

Anyone with a gifted child, especially a highly gifted child, could benefit from this book -- and will likely find insights about himself or herself as well.

Reading Galileo with Down to a Science

2010-03-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

Miss C and I had a fine time last night at our first book club discussion with Down to a Science. This San Francisco group sponsors lectures by scientists and also has a monthly science book discussion. Last night we joined in the discussion of Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel.

Miss C and I both really enjoyed the book but she was greatly frustrated with the Catholic Church's censorship of Galileo.

In Galileo's insistence that science is objective and subject to experimentation, that it must be kept separate from matters of faith, and that the Bible should not be interpreted literally, we saw direct parallels with current, ongoing attacks by creationists and intelligent design promoters on the science of evolution. We felt sad that 400 years later, so many still do not understand that by definition, religion cannot be science, and vice versa. There is no place for "belief" in science. We also find it sad that today, non-scientists in general still do not understand the scientific definitions of terms like "theory," "fact," and "hypothesis," yet discuss them as if they do -- just as in Galileo's time. And yet another parallel is that they discuss scientific issues without actually having read the scientific works, again, just as some (but not all) of the Inquisitors did with Galileo's work.

Something that was new to us was learning how religious Galileo really was. His close relationship with one of his illegitimate daughters, a cloistered nun with the order of St. Clare, was woven throughout this book to show us both the depth of his faith and the personal side of the man. The book succeeded greatly in both of these goals.

It also showed what a gifted person he was, not only in his great intellectual strengths, but in his extreme drive to discover, to study, to write, to be in the thick of the exchange of scientific ideas, whatever the cost, and despite frequent physical infirmity on his part. How difficult it must have been for him to "suffer the fools" around him in a scientific sense, while holding the deepest reverence for God and his religion. This seems yet another indication of his greatness -- the ability to tolerate such extreme cognitive dissonance.

Finally, this book painted a very complex picture of Galileo, his science, his religion, and his times, taking Miss C far beyond the more simplified version of his story she had known before. Altogether, this was a very worthwhile study and the discussion with other interested adults really enhanced it.

Camp Summit for the Gifted

2010-03-06T08:44:00.000-08:00

I'm very excited about the new summer camp, Camp Summit for the Gifted, Talented, and Creative. I'm serving on the Community Advisory Board, and so far I've been able to help out by creating the Web site and a brochure for the CAG (California Association for the Gifted) conference. The directors of the camp are wonderful and have a great vision for a camp that focuses on the social and emotional aspects of giftedness, and is a lot of fun for the campers.

My daughter will also be attending the camp, and it looks like we'll have a strong presence from other kids and teens in our homeschool group, San Francisco Bay Area Gifted Homeschoolers.

The camp is set in the beautiful Marin Headlands, an incredibly picturesque place with mountains, ocean, lagoon, and nature trails galore. It's a short walk to the Point Bonita Lighthouse, which overlooks the Golden Gate, the body of water that opens to San Francisco Bay, and over which the fabled bridge connects San Francisco to Marin County. We have spent quite a bit of time in the Headlands over the years, and feel this will be a fantastic place for such a summer camp.

Topsy-Turvy

2010-02-23T19:36:00.000-08:00

We're watching "Topsy-Turvy," a 1999 movie about Gilbert & Sullivan and their making of "The Mikado." It was difficult to find a copy of the video, even though the package declares that "23 film critics called it one of the best films of 1999!" It wasn't available on DVD, but I finally tracked down a VHS tape at the public library.

It seemed really necessary. Miss C has become such a big G&S fan, between summer camps at San Francisco Conservatory of Music ("Gilbert & Sullivan Scenes") and lessons with her wonderful voice teacher, who is very involved with Lamplighters Music Theatre in San Francisco -- a mostly G&S troupe.

We're set to attend Lamplighters' "Singalong Mikado" soon (having seen their "Patience" in January). So we need to know the music, and having the historical background only enriches the experience.

Considering the influence of G&S on early Broadway musicals, this study is really essential for my music-loving girl.

Molecular Primatology

2010-01-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

This week Miss C and I enjoyed a talk by Dr. Todd Disotell, a "molecular primatologist," at the California Academy of Sciences. The talk was sponsored by The Leakey Foundation, which promotes the study of human origins, and was opened with a video message by one of its poster scientists, Jane Goodall.

Dr. Disotell told an inspiring story about how he decided to become a primatologist, a scientist who studies primates. He said his mother had read Goodall's book, In the Shadow of Man, to him and his sister when he was about nine years old. He then wrote to Goodall and she wrote him back. He was on track to become a primatologist ever since then. I loved this story since I have always read challenging books aloud to Miss C and still do.

The molecular part of his job is analysis of DNA from fossil samples, using fast computers (molecular systematics). By analyzing differences in DNA between different related species over time, he and his colleagues are able to date the splits in evolutionary lineages.

He explained that there are now 18 primate species for which they have collected entire genomes, so they can compare genetic variation at a detailed level. This evidence is compared to the fossil record, which can either confirm or conflict with this genetic data.

Dr. Disotell discussed the "molecular clock" first described by Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl back in the 1960s, in which they asserted that analysis of molecular differences would tell the true story of evolution. But Dr. Disotell said that with advances since then, his team now thinks of this as a "molecular Swatch," after the multi-colored, multi-patterned wristwatch brand, because the record is seldom strictly linear. As an example, when an ancient fossil is examined, he said, it could be an ancient ancestor of a modern species -- or it could be like a coelacanth, an ancient prehistoric-looking fish that lives in the deep to this day.

Also, the fossil record, he said, represents only one percent or less of the creatures that actually have lived on earth. He said that the first primate fossils known have been dated at 55 million years ago. But based on his methods of molecular analysis, his team now is asserting that primates first originated 70 to 75 million years ago.

Advances in the molecular systematics field are limited by the speed of the computers used. Dr. Disotell said that a single chromosome run takes two days on the fastest computer his lab has (at New York University).

He and other scientists are also exploring more recent splits in primate evolution, within the last 200,000 years, such as between modern humans and Neanderthals. For that study to really flourish, he said, much more excavation and study is needed in Africa. Eighty percent of the world's human genetic variation is found within Africa.