In the "Real World"

you need to be socaila and confident about talking in front of peopl and being around everyone and when your homeschooled it doesnt prepare you for that.  — Chelsea

My sincerest thanks to Susannah L. Griffee, Katherine Schulten, and the entire staff at the New York Times for publishing their Saturday article “Would You Want to Be Home-Schooled?”    In a follow-up piece to Margaret Heidenry’s “My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists,” the Times encouraged students 13 and older to comment on the following question:

Tell us about your experiences and thoughts about home-schooling. Do you think this type of education can prepare children for the “real world”? How might it be better than traditional schooling? What might children miss from not attending a regular school? Do you agree with the writer’s mother that working at one’s own pace and following one’s genuine interests is the best way to learn?

In publishing the comments, Ms. Griffee and Ms. Schulten clearly demonstrated why homeschooling must remain a freedom for all Americans.  The results are both stunning and sad.  I am sharing some of them here, unedited, as they appear on the NYT website.   They speak for themselves.

AJ did not think “that home schooling is a good thing because it will not prepare a certain child for the world.”  He did not tell us who the certain child is, so we are left to trust that there is one child who should remain in a public school.  Leslie thought  “homeschooling is dumb.”  She continued, “I think homeschooling doesn’t prepare kids for the real world. they don’t learn how to socialize with other people. Some parents may sugar code the kids. So they might not know everything there suppose to know. no i do not agree.”   

“Sugar code” their kids?

The “real world” theme of criticism ran through mulitple comments.  Kristen expressed her concerns that “homeschooling is ok but public schools are better because its almost like life you are going to have to deal with people that you dont like in life and school shows this at times.i dont think this could preper us for the real world because your not comunicatingi with people as much as you would at school.for most people it is a good learning activity”   Kristen, learn how to write well.   It is an important skill that you need for college and the work force.  Your comment has so many errors, I’m thinking of making my homeschooled children correct it as a grammar exercise.  If you believe that you do write well, your teachers are sugar coding your grades.

Brandon was “not in favor of home schooling. I think that it is important for a student to attend a regular school. This is because it will allow them to become more prepared for the real world.  When you think about it, home schooling only encorages children to stay at home, instead of preparing them to leave.  It gets them used to the comfortable living arangements at home more than usual.”  He expressed his fears for the future of all homeschoolers when he wrote that “…if they do go outside, they have no personal confrontations with other children, so they will not easily develope speaking to other people, which means no friends, no girl/boyfriend, no husbands or wives, their lives would be pretty much empty.”

What a tragedy!  All homeschooled children are condemned to a life of hermitude, living in their parent’s basements, passing the years playing Xbox and Wii, knowing that their lives would have had purpose and meaning if their parents had only sent them to a real school.  Oh, the humanity!

I’m not certain where these kids think homeschoolers live, if not in the “real world.”  Is there a secret “unreal world” in which all homeschoolers reside?  If there is, I did not get the memo.  Is there a secret handshake or password that I need to get inside?   In fact, homeschoolers do live in the real world, and in doing so, we have to deal with the results of the average public school education as demonstrated in the comments section of the NYT article.   Alas, I must take great comfort in the knowledge that my homeschooled children will grow up to run the company where these kids will sweep the floors. 

Comparing Homeschoolers with Public Schoolers

Our good friend Cindy from Get Along Home, posted an article at High Country Mom Squad this week. It raises a concern that many of us homeschoolers struggle with from time to time. Comparing. How do our kids measure up?

Should we compare our kids with their public school counterparts? Cindy (in classic Cindy fashion) digs into that question in this GREAT post. Here's an excerpt. But definitely don't stop here...go read the rest!!

A few weeks ago I was talking—more accurately, moaning–to my husband about our second-grader’s lackluster progress in math. I’m not really sure what to try next, or if we just need to stick with what we’re doing, so I was just kind of thinking out loud about my options. My husband, because he likes to know these kinds of things (geeks like data, you know) asked how David’s progress would compare to that of school children his own age. So I did what any rational, confident homeschooling mom would do when faced with such an innocuous question: I freaked out.

KEEP READING...

An Impromptu Homeschooling Field Trip

I took the kids to Kansas City this morning.

Tater dropped off donations for homeless veterans from her American Heritage Girls Troop. We had the honor of dropping off the donations because her mother runs the troop.

On the way home we found the Union Hill Cemetery.  After the cholera epidemic of 1849 filled the cemeteries of the towns of Westport, Missouri, and Kansas, Missouri, a new cemetery was needed.  In 1857, 49 acres of land was donated for a new cemetery.  That was the start of Union Hill.  There are lots of old and interesting graves in this cemetery.  I liked the gravestones shaped like tree stumps.  

I enjoyed the Chinese gravestone, which apparently is rare for a 19^th century cemetery. 

According to the cemetery’s brochure, deceased Chinese immigrants were usually shipped back to China to be buried with their ancestors.  We stopped at a Chinese restaurant for lunch and I asked the hostess if she could translate for me, but despite all the conversation she held in Chinese with her husband, all she could say to me was, “I don’t know.”

The interesting surprise of this visit was discovering the grave of James Silas Calhoun, the first Territorial Governor of New Mexico.  How he went from a guy who served as a Colonel in the Mexican War to a territorial governor to dead on the Santa Fe Trail and buried in the town of Kansas, Missouri, is anyone’s guess. 

Eventually, the town of Kansas, Missouri, became the town of Kansas City, Missouri, and annexed the town of Westport, which is now a neighborhood.

We missed one tombstone that we’ll have to return to see (and we drove right past it!).  There’s a grave for Joseph Boggs, a man who was born in 1749, served in the Revolutionary War militia, and died in 1843.  Pretty cool.    

We also saw tent city, also known as Kansas City’s Occupy Wall Street.

It’s located in a park across from the Federal Reserve.    The group is smaller than it was a week ago.  They don’t do much, but the American flags are new. 

The kids got to see protest in action and learn about the freedom to assemble when you should be searching for a job. 

These things happen when you chuck your school work and head off on an impromptu homeschooling field trip.

Thank You for Your Kindness

I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you who took the time to nominate this blog for the annual homeschool blog awards hosted at The Homeschool Post.  Thank you, also, to everyone who took the time to cast a vote for The Homeschool Apologist.   I appreciate the compliment and the vote of support.   

Now, please stop.

Four years ago, I wrote about my inner curmudgeon on a post appropriately titled “Crank.”   In that post, I shared the fact that deep down inside, I’m really a very cranky person.  I’ve reposted the article here if you have the time (or desire) for a good laugh at my expense.  Four years later, a lot has changed, but not my inner crankiness.  I share this with you in order to tell you that I really, really, loathe, dislike, despise, abhor, don’t like the annual homeschool blog awards.  I dislike most blog awards programs.  I’m not going to go into the reasons why.   I haven’t written about it over the years simply because I’ve tried to accept the kindness extended to me by the people who took the time to nominate and vote for my blogs in their various incarnations.  What has ended up happening over the years is that the folks who run the HSBA announced the nominees, and I immediately wrote them to request that my blog be removed from their contest.  I will give them credit where credit is due: they’ve always honored my request.

This year it got out of hand.  The Homeschool Apologist wasn’t just nominated in one category, but three.  This madness must end!   Please, whoever you are, stop nominating this blog for awards.  Instead, leave a comment!  Comments are far better than the emptiness that commonly follows posts.  Heck, even being told that my writing reminds someone of their uncle’s smelly socks is better than silence.    I will say that I appreciate the person who nominated The Homeschool Apologist for Best Group/Family Blog.   Together, Linda and I are not large enough to be a group, but she’s definitely family.   And for the record, Linda agreed with me.  She beat me to the punch Monday morning, requesting our blog to be removed from the voting rolls before I could.

For those of you who are interested in the annual homeschool blog awards, pretend you’re in Chicago.  Vote early and vote often!   And good luck to the remaining nominees.

Crank - An Arby's Archives Repost from 11/7/07

cur•mudg•eon kərˈmʌdʒ ən - [ker-muhj-uh n]
–noun
A bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous person
[Origin: 1570–80; unexplained; perh. cur- repr. CUR ]

—Related forms
cur•mudg•eon•ly, adjective

—Synonyms grouch, crank, bear, Arby, sourpuss, crosspatch.

I’ve often wondered what my children will say when they put their heads together as adults and complete the sentence, “Dad is a...” I wonder how long it will take them to figure out that underneath all of the layers of Dad, underneath all of the one-liners, the wrestling on the floor in the middle of Kmart, his obsessions over baking the perfect loaf of bread and making lump-free gravy, and a multitude of other quirks and idiosyncrasies, there lays a crank. At heart, I’m a really grumpy person. I was born a toothless, wrinkly curmudgeon. It’ll just take another 30 or 40 years for my features to catch-up.

Yesterday I had one of those days that are ideal for blogging about if I can get up a good head of steam, but I have no steam today. I’m steamless. I lost all of my steam yesterday. It was one of those days where I found myself spinning in circles. Captain Chaos took the opportunity of my being momentarily distracted by laundry to locate a large purple crayon and a freshly painted wall. Her artwork extended from the base of the basement stairs to the very top. I’m thinking that if I can teach her to sign her name at the bottom I won’t have to wash off her artistic endeavors. While I scrubbed away her mural she went into our classroom and began her daily task of dismantling the shelves. While I cleaned up her mess in the classroom she ran into our den in order to stand in front of the TV and wet her pants. In the middle of all of this came the perfectly normal cries of “Dad, I need some help with this problem!” I cleaned her up, helped the General, and then took the opportunity during the momentary lull in the action to cut and hang a few small pieces of drywall for my a-little-bit-at-a-time basement remodeling project. Captain chaos decided to help by using my drywall saws as drum sticks and then dumping a bucket of drywall screws on the classroom carpeting.

Major Havoc made his presence known. His one goal in life yesterday was to play Mousetrap with his brother and then ride bikes. He made his wishes known by asking every thirty seconds, “Is he done yet?” There was no amount of alternate activities that I could offer that would distract him long enough to give me five minutes without saying, “No, not yet.” and “I’ll tell you as soon as he is done.” And so the cycle of clean a room, move on to another room, have the previous room messed-up by the kids, teach a lesson (and yesterday was a day for remedial work) and get something productive accomplished like doing the laundry was dotted with six “accidents” by the Captain and I spent a good portion of the day fighting the urge to dive head-first into a quart bottle of Old English 800 which you can still get for a dollar forty at the local distillery complete with mandatory brown paper bag wrapping.

Whew!

After dinner, we attended the activity that General Mayhem and the Boss had been waiting for, for an entire week. Last night was the General’s first-ever Boy Scout meeting. We finally found a Boy Scout troop in a five-hundred mile radius of our home that doesn’t meet on Monday nights. On Monday nights the General has his Karate class. It was love-at-first sight for the kid. He walked in, was assigned to a patrol, and instantly started learning about extreme cold weather survival tips for the camping trip that he is attending this weekend while I absorbed Boy Scout sticker shock and the knowledge that I, too, would be enjoying Jack Frost and the great outdoors from Friday night until Sunday evening. I fought the overwhelming urge to shout “You’ve gotta be #$%*%$# kidding me!” It was so cold last night my nipples had stiff nipples. The novelty of cold weather camping wore off twenty years ago when a group of Aussie survival specialists dropped me off with four other guys, two shovels and an ice saw, on the arid plains of Antarctica with the line, “We’ll come get you sometime tomorrow.” We had plenty of snow, plenty of ice, and plenty of sunshine to build an ice house for five and start thawing dinner.

The General looked at me expectantly and asked “Can I go?” and I flashed a reassuring smile that hid my initial deeply seated skepticism and otherwise sour outlook on a weekend sitting with nine complete strangers in sub zero temperatures for two days and confidently said, “We’ll talk to your mother,” knowing full well that she would say, “I’ll pack your bag.”

We returned home and talked to his mother and sent him to bed. I hit the wine bottle for a couple of glasses of White Zinfandel, safe in knowledge that drinking liquor from a bottle that has a cork is far superior and more socially acceptable than consuming a liquor that is stoppered by a screw-cap.

The funny thing is that the Boss knows the cranky side of my personality and she loves me in spite of it. I’m blessed that way. We talked about the coming weekend and she let me say everything that I wanted to say, knowing that I wasn’t really putting up a fight about going camping. I just had to get the crankiness out of my system. It had been a long day. She listened patiently and assured me that I will have a good time and then said, “I’ll pack your bag.” So I’m going camping this weekend.

My biggest fear in acknowledging that I am, at heart, cranky, is that we tend to have our true natures exposed and magnified in our elderly years. I do not wish to be an old difficult person dependent upon my wife and children for care only to have them dread being around me because I am cranky. So I work regularly on approaching life through prayer and humor, softening my otherwise surly disposition. It has to be working. I don’t think the Boss would have me if it wasn’t. And my little girl, who wormed her way into my heart the first time I held her, can soften the distempered beast with a quick smile and a soft “Daddy!” in her sing-song voice; although, I still reserve the right to stand in front of her TV set when I’m 96, wet my pants, and skip merrily through her house.

If You Don't Like Homeschooling, Just Blame Asperger's Syndrome

Having made the gross tactical error of admitting to Linda that I didn’t have much about which to write, I received in reply a link to an anti-homeschooling blog post on the Parents Educating at Home (PEAH) website that must be read to be believed. The PEAH website is dedicated to providing resources for the homeschooling community. I still haven’t decided whether or not to take the letter seriously. It was so poorly written, I suspect it was a parody. If you have even a rudimentary grasp of the English language your head will hurt after digesting a Seattle public school teacher’s reasons why homeschooling is bad. I attempted to number the spelling and grammatical errors in the original post in a futile effort to identify all of them, but I ran out of numbers.

Karen is a mom of four “highly capable children” and a Seattle, Washington, public school teacher who explained that the hidden agenda of public education is “how to be a member of a large complex social group "society".” The main thrust of her reasoning was the commonly misunderstood and misapplied “socialization” argument. She expressed concern that homeschooled children will be unable to “understand proper chain of command (who to go to first and why), following directions of those placed in charge of you, or trying to be a part of the society in which you live.” She explained that, “we are judged every minute of every day by friends, peers, clients, even the cashier at the grocery store. “ Karen may have a point. We all know how devastating it can be when the elderly lady running the express checkout lane at Wal*Mart disapproves of your pants.

Karen’s evidence for her concerns was completely anecdotal. If we take her observations seriously, all homeschooled sixth grade boys wear “bedazzled pants,” are incapable of “dealing with peers in small and large groups,” are incapable of “dealing with adults” on their own, struggle with “puncuality,” do not smile when they do not want to smile (there’s a capital offense), believe that everyone loves them unconditionally, and do not finish their homework when they are too tired to think. The answer to those flaws is for the parents of homeschoolers to volunteer their free time at the local school. Homeschoolers should attend a public school, maintain “perfect attendance,” and take “pride for their social group like the school's football team or drumline.” She explained that this drum line fervor “will serve them well as CEO's physicians and leaders.” She'll get no argument from me. I do believe that the late Steve Jobs’ last words were, “God, I loved my high school’s drum line!”

As if Karen did not already supply ample evidence in favor of mandatory homeschooling for all Seattle area children (would you want your children taught by a woman who thinks and writes so well?), she saved her best comments for the end of her blog post when she explained that “many homeschooled students who attempt to go to public high school and a large majority are like a fish out of water. They missed their learning window and may never be able to be a part of the social world that is thriving around them.They do not speak and are filled with anxiety or they are so inappropriate they have had referrals for aspergers.” Did you catch that? Many and a large majority. Does anyone outside of her faculty lounge take this woman seriously? I’m not certain who should be more insulted, homeschoolers or Aspy kids. I can’t wait to read the responses when the autism crowd reads this one.

Karen’s own words speak for her. They speak volumes. They reflect arrogance and ignorance, as well as a lack of critical thinking skills, writing skills, discernment, and judgment. After you visit her post and leave your comments, please share them below.

Halloween Fun

Last night, the Boss and I escorted Harry Potter and his little sister, Powerpuff Girl “Blossom,” through the neighborhood to beg for candy door-to-door.

We noticed quite quickly that our children spent far more time at each door than the average child. The average kid ran up to the door, yelled “trick or treat!” and bolted for the next house before the candy hit the bottom of their bag. Several kids lapped us on a rather large cul-de-sac. The reason for the delay was twofold. When friendly neighbors told our daughter to pick whatever piece of candy she wanted, the girl went shopping. She dug through each bowl, carefully searching through the cornucopia of confectionaries until she discovered the perfect sweet. The second reason for their leisurely stroll through the neighborhood was their chattiness. Yes, our two social misfits - those strange, unsocialized homeschoolers - enjoyed talking to the homeowners dolling out the goods. They explained their costumes, who made them, etc. It was one gigantic social event. And they said, “Thank you.”

Score one for the homeschoolers!