A Good Laugh, a Sad Truth

This post was so funny I just had to copy it from Cheryl’s post in Free Range Learning:

The Bitter Homeschooler’s Wish List:

(From Secular Homeschooling Magazine, Issue #1)

1 Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?

2 Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.

3 Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.

4 Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.

5 If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a “reality” show, the above goes double.

6 Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.

7 We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.

8 Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.

9 Stop assuming that if we’re religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.

10 We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.

11 Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn’t have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don’t need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can’t teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there’s a reason I’m so reluctant to send my child to school.

12 If my kid’s only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he’d learn in school, please understand that you’re calling me an idiot. Don’t act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.

13 Stop assuming that because the word “home” is right there in “homeschool,” we never leave the house. We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and icky.

14 Stop assuming that because the word “school” is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we’re into the “school” side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don’t have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.

15 Stop asking, “But what about the Prom?” Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don’t get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I’m one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.

16 Don’t ask my kid if she wouldn’t rather go to school unless you don’t mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn’t rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.

17 Stop saying, “Oh, I could never homeschool!” Even if you think it’s some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you’re horrified. One of these days, I won’t bother disagreeing with you any more.

18 If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you’re allowed to ask how we’ll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can’t, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn’t possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.

19 Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child’s teacher as well as her parent. I don’t see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing him around the way I do about everything else.

20 Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he’s homeschooled. It’s not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.

21 Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she’s homeschooled.

22 Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy because I homeschool my kids.

23 Quit assuming that I must be some kind of saint because I homeschool my kids.

24 Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won’t get because they don’t go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.

25 Here’s a thought: If you can’t say something nice about homeschooling, shut up!

Field Journal

It’s funny how, just when I think we’ve had an uneventful week and I’m wondering what I’ll record in my Observing for Learning form (a twice-monthly reporting tool for the SelfDesign program), something fun comes up out of the blue.

Yesterday all the pieces were in place to finally act on a suggestion made by DD’s Learning Consultant a while back: DD started a Field Journal. Those of you familiar with Dora the Explorer and her animal rescuer cousin Diego may know of the concept of a field journal from the latter character’s shows and online games (the Dinosaur Adventure shown here is, predictably, DD’s favorite). My kids are fans of Diego and so the concept of a field journal was met with immediate enthusiasm from DD.

I got a notebook with pages that are half-lined so there is room to draw and write. Yesterday morning I had to clean the kitchen floors and DD wanted to hang out with me so I sat her down at the kitchen table with iPhoto on my laptop, a set of coloured pens and her new journal, and two reference books. I put photos of our recent finds on the screen and she drew pictures of them and then copied out their names (both scientific name and common name) on the lines below. This activity was great – she got to practice writing (hers is getting neater all the time), drawing, and her powers of observation were stimulated by having to copy details from a photograph to paper, and also by having to identify the critter in her books.

As an example, we had this photo from last month’s mushroom hunt. Our new mushroom book, All the Rain Promises, arrived the other day so we pulled it out to identify this specimen. Eventually we decided it must be a deer mushroom (more on mushrooming in a future post), so DD drew a mushroom and wrote “Pluteus cervinus, Deer Mushroom”.

She then found a photo of a stinkbug we’d previously identified as Uhler’s Stink Bug. But when I had her leaf through Insects of the Pacific Northwest she came across Say’s Stink Bug (top photo below ), which looked a lot like ours (bottom photo below). Even I wasn’t sure which was which (note: the book uses a different photo of Say’s, one that looked alot more like our photo of Uhler’s). So the two of us went bit by bit through the identifying information in the book. The pronotum and abdomen are described as “edged with white to pale yellow” for Uhler’s and “edged with light yellow and white” for Say’s. The book describes Say’s as having “three distinct, white spots anteriorly” on the scutellum, but the photo of Uhler’s in the book also showed three distinct white spots. Our photo doesn’t, but perhaps it was a resolution issue.
Both stink bugs have a bright yellow spot where the brown (wingstips?) are. What finally clinched it for us was the fact that Say’s wingtips were much less visible then Uhler’s in the book photos. ‘Course now that I see the above photo of Say’s that might not be a distinguising characteristic after all! Anyways, we’re pretty confident that ours is an Uhler’s, but the process of identification is a good one for honing DD’s observation skills.

DD spent some time with her field journal that morning, going through the photo collection. She had such a good time that she didn’t stop with flora and fauna, but decided to put in some inanimate objects as well. Thus her field journal has a page documenting her recent creative art projects, including the picture frame, treasure chest, and playdoh planets!