This ping list is for articles of interest to homeschoolers. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping List. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added or removed from either list, or both.
Posted on 06/26/2009 1:08:36 PM PDT by Chickensoup
The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List
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!
My own complaint: please don’t brag about how fantastic your kid’s school is, how wonderful the teachers are, and how your child is doing so great. It just sounds defensive.
Homeschool ping
Someone once said that they do work on socialization skills with their home-schooled children.
At least once a week, they take them into the bathroom where they curse and threaten them and take away their lunch money.
Wouldn’t want ‘em to miss out!
"I wish my kids hadn't cried so much when I tried to put them in a real school."
Deserves to be repeated.
That is heart-breakingly funny.
I really hate to say this, and I don’t mean to be insulting, but seriously, you do sound bitter.
I’ve NEVER run into anyone saying half these things. If you do, time to look for new friends.
I shortstop all this stuff apparently. I start with the fact that my 9 year-old is in 7th grade and my 11 year old is in 9th. The rest of it, I blow off.
This came in an email from some magazine called Secular Homeschooling...I havent found it yet.
I am not bitter but I do recognize two out of three issues described.
That’s Oberon!
“My wife and I were also concerned that our children would miss out on the socialization available in the public schools...so once a week we take our kids into the bathroom, cuss at them, push them around, steal their lunch money, and offer them drugs, and that seems to take care of it.”
FReeper Oberon
Yesterday, my kids were doing their math and the neighbor kid was waiting for them to finish up. Of course he asked why they had to do work in the summer.
I asked him why he let the government tell him when he was allowed to learn.
Phew!
Shalom.
This ping list is for articles of interest to homeschoolers. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping List. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added or removed from either list, or both.
Again, this tone of rant is not characteristic of most homeschoolers. I don't think it's cute or funny. It's, as it says, bitter.
Why not?
Why would a parent send their child into the atheistic government schools? Hey! That's 35 hours a week of a godless worldview! Add homework and other after school activities to that and that is a FULL-TIME job for the kid working at learning a godless worldview!
Also....Who says any kid learns anything in an institutional school? Have any studies actually been done on this? It seems to me that academically successful institutionalized children have parents who do **everything** I did as a homeschooling parent:
**Check homework for completeness and neatness
** Get outside help when the child has a problem.
** Turn off the TV
** Read to the child
** Take child to library
** Have books and magazines in the home
** Visit museums
** Have regular study hours
** Encourage the development of talents ( music, art, theater, soccer, karate,..etc.)
It is very likely that institutionalized kids are really being **afterschooled**. It is likely that the parents’ and the kid themselves who are doing the teaching in the home. The only thing the institutional school is doing is sending home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow.
So...If you can read this thank your parent for “afterschooling” you.
I’ve run into a lot of these same comments myself.
The one I get all the time is....
“I could never homeschool my kids” ..... and I do always want to agree. It is sad when they then continue to say they couldn’t handle having the kids home all day and are happy for the free babysitting.
It is also time to pointed ask Christian teachers why they would accept **money** for assisting, promoting, aiding, and abetting a government institution the puts children to work FULL-TIME at the job learn a godless worldview. The children **know** that this is conflict with Christian teaching. They will correctly conclude that this is hypocritical.
That's the least it. There's also the drug use/exchange and sexualization - and that's just the bathrooms.
The secularism, social deviance and leftist indoctrination by the NEA drones and student peers that goes on in the rest of the building is not the type of "socialization" I would dream of inflicting on my child.
Not to mention the fact that the kids aren't taught Western history and literature, and increasing percentages of them either don't graduate or graduate with elementary level math and english skills.
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