Now That's Some Recipe

My wife and I have discovered a source of unexpected humor.

We go to the grocery store once a week. During the week, if anyone notices we're running low on anything, we write the item on a notepad that we hang on the refrigerator with magnets.

Note that this means our shopping lists tend to get written in an almost random order.

Then, when the end of the week comes, all that remains is for us to do a once-over on the list to make sure it has everything we need, and off we go. Usually this once-over involves one of us reading the list to the other and asking, "Now, can you think of anything else we need?"

Well, some time back, one of us got the idea into his or her head (we can't remember who started it) that these random lists, read off rapid-fire like that, actually started to sound a little like sick, disgusting recipes for who-knows-what. It's gotten to the point now that we can't read our own grocery lists without breaking into fits of giggles, as we imagine what horrors will be greeting us at the dinner table when the recipe is complete.

So for example, here is today's shopping list. Read this to yourself, and imagine....

Dishwashing detergent
Ramen
Baby formula
Eggs
Tortilla chips
Basil
Bar soap
Sausage
Diced ham
Macaroni
Rotini
Velveeta
Cheddar cheese
Frozen chicken
Frozen fruit juice
Milk
Diapers
Fresh fruit
Cream of Mushroom Soup

...place all ingredients into a large cauldron, and stir continually until the lumps go away. Occassionally cut loose a wild cackle. ;-)

Who thinks of these things?

Pretty much since I was a kid I've been fascinated by sports events that are actually combinations of events, where an athlete has to be good at everything to win the medal. I think it was because the American Bruce Jenner won the Decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics, when I was five, and the event just stuck in my brain. After all, everyone was talking about it, and he was on the front of the Wheaties boxes, so it must have been a matter of earth-shaking importance, right? Thus the five-year-old mind works. I wonder what the Pillowfight Fairy will consider of earth-shaking importance....

I digress. Then there's the Triathlon, which tests sheer, iron endurance of the competitors. I still wonder how people can race for that long without killing themselves.

But then, I started to get exposed to combinations of events that seemed a little incongruous. Who decided to put those events together, and why? The first time I wondered this was when, as a child, I watched a Biathlon event on TV. The competitors combine Nordic skiing with marksmanship, of all things; they ski long distances, then drop to the ground, pull their rifles off their backs, shoot at several targets, then off they go again. As I said, this looked a little incongruous at first--until someone explained that the event started as training exercises in the Swedish and Norwegian armies. These military forces deploy soldiers trained to move about on skis. Because of the terrain and climate in Scandanavia, soldiers must be able to ski long distances and shoot accurately. Ok, that one makes sense.

But I'm apparently not the only one out there who finds the combination of different sports interesting--even humorous. The movie Baseketball involves a hybrid sport of Baseball and Basketball. And there are plenty of other examples--like the Monty Python sketches about "Olympic Hide-and-Seek" and "Upper Middle-Class Twit of the Year" competitions, and the Muppet Sports skit of cross-country billiards. And of course, there were all those beer commercials from several years back that wanted to illustrate the novelty of "less filling, tastes great" by mixing different television shows, giving us Full-Contact Golf (Golf + Football), Beauty Pageant Hockey, and Professional Culinary Wrestling.

And then I was introduced by a former co-worker to the concept of joggling, or juggling while jogging. It's supposed to build dexterity and cardiovascular fitness at the same time, but I can't help but imagine that its practicioners are prone to chest injuries that look vaguely like parking meters, mailboxes, streetlights, other jogglers....

But nothing prepared me for the one I read today, hat tip to the Volokh Conspiracy .

London - Andreas Dilschneider was still thinking about his opening moves on the chessboard when his opponent rushed up to him and punched him. Several times.

That's right, folks, I present for your consideration the surreal phenomenon of Chessboxing.

And while that's surreal enough, I loved the descriptions of other niche sports mentioned on the second page of the article, that go by names like blokarting, blackminton, tchoukball, urban golf, underwater hockey, and street luge. Um, you may want to wear a helmet on that last one. And body armor wouldn't hurt, except that it might....

Wow. I'm curious, are there any other hybrid sports you would like to see? Note, this doesn't mean you actually want to do them, just see them.


Update: ten seconds after I hit "Publish Post", my dear wife piped up with "Bungee Fishing?" So remember all that stuff I said about her being the practical one of the family? Nevermind....

A few quizzes!

With a big ol' tip o' the hat to The Anchoress, I have a couple of quizzes to share with you. First up: What is your inner European? I mean, if you could be a European, which people would you belong to?

As for me, I'm apparently a Dutchman.

Your Inner European is Dutch!

Open minded and tolerant. You're up for just about anything.

Who's Your Inner European?

Hmmm... I'm not so sure about that. I'd rather expect that I'd be an Irishman or a Scot. And it'd be really cool to be a Viking. But at least I'm not a Belgian, so I think I can live with that. ;-)

The other one determines what reading level is required to understand any given website. And according to them:

Get a Cash Advance

Note: I don't endorse the Cash Advance thing.

At any rate, just for kicks I tried this out on some other people's blogs. The site of Dr. Helen Smith, wife of the Instapundit, is written at a Genius level; while the poor hapless Instapundit himself apparently only writes at a Junior High level. This of course just reinforces the question that all geeks want answered: How in the world did he manage to wind up with a woman like that? And, from a more practical point of view, what strategy should they follow if they want to overachieve in the marriage sweepstakes too? Clearly, Glenn Reynolds has some secret mojo that he's not letting everybody else in on.

Now, I could report the reading levels of the blogs of my extended family members, but I'll let them discover their ratings for themselves. Have fun!

A Few More Ground Rules

Correction: I wrote the name "Dana" when I should have written the name "Dawn". I plead sleep-deprivation. It's fixed now.



I've been contemplating writing about one or more of the topics that were brought up in the comments of my post "On Gaining a Quality Education at Home", and which I pulled out and listed here. But it occurred to me that I'd better give a little more context first, and set a few more ground rules.

The posts I've written that seem to have offended people the most were the aforementioned "On Gaining a Quality Education at Home", and last month's Virtue, Peer Pressure, and Homeschoolers.

And these posts were very similar to each other. They had the same form, because they were essentially trying to do the same thing. Each of these posts took a commonly-made criticism of the practice of homeschooling, and attempted to debunk it.

As I mentioned in the "Time to Set Some Ground Rules" post linked to above, there are many commonly made criticisms of the homeschooling movement and of homeschoolers themselves, that we homeschoolers find ourselves answering over and over. This fact was amply demonstrated in the comments of my "Gaining" post, where in the space of three comments, I was subjected to every one of the following objections to homeschooling:

If families pull their kids out to homeschool them, it hurts the public schools and the teachers who work in them.

It's selfish to do this, since for some kids that's their only option.

Education in this country has evolved from homeschooling to one-room schooling, to public schooling; so going back to homeschooling would be a reversal of progress.

Selectively pulling out of the public schools is elitist and unfair to those who can't.

The public schools need the support of educated parents for the benefit of uneducated kids

Homeschoolers don't know how to handle reading disabilities.

We're unaware of alternate teaching/learning styles.

Public schools prepare kids better by putting them in more lifelike situations.

Homeschoolers don't get exposed as much to people of different ethnicities.

Christians need to understand the culture if they are to reach out to people.

Homeschoolers are more likely to present only one side of any argument.

Homeschooling hinders the formation of a common culture.

Now, when confronted with objections like these, the homeschooler will often find value in examining the question carefully (at least, for the first couple of times. After that, it just gets old). What exactly does the criticism say? What do the terms mean, exactly? Are these criticisms valid? If so, why--and to what extent? If not, why not? What are the underlying assumptions of the objection, and are the assumptions valid or not? Does the objection point up a potential weakness in the homeschooling model--and if so, is there a way the homeschooler can compensate for it? Are there any potential advantages in the homeschooling model, that can be leveraged to smooth over any weaknesses?

When the homeschooler confronts these questions and answers them fairly, the exercise can have tremendous benefits. For one thing, the homeschooler arrives at a much stronger understanding of why she does what she does. Often times, after contemplating the objection the homeschooler will realize that there are some changes that should be made; that homeschooling can answer the objection just fine, if the parent makes the effort to do this and this and this. And when the homeschooler finishes the contemplation and arrives at a better understanding of an issue, writing about it can have great benefits for other homeschoolers, who are often facing exactly the same issue. So I'm all for diving in and answering these questions.

And this is exactly what I did with the two posts mentioned above.

• In the "Virtue" post, I examined the common criticism that homeschoolers--being educated by parents in a sheltered environment--grow up without learning to cope with peer pressure, and thus are unprepared to deal with the real world when it comes time to leave home. To answer this, I examined an unstated assumption underlying the criticism, and concluded that the assumption was faulty; then I suggested a different model for the way peer pressure operates, and observed that homeschoolers are actually well-positioned to learn how to deal with peer pressure, if they take certain steps.


• Then in the "Gaining" post, I examined the common criticism that homeschooling parents, being (frequently) not as well educated as professional teachers, are thereby unable to provide as rigorous an education. To answer this, I pointed out that there is at least one other educational model than that of the traditional classroom, and it quite effectively makes up for lack of teacher education by leveraging better student-teacher ratio. I also pointed out that if a student has been trained to be well-motivated and well-disciplined, that student will acquire a good education on his own initiative regardless of the quality of his teachers. And again, I observed that homeschoolers are well-positioned to raise students like this, so long as they pay special attention to the character education of the students.

But the mere act of answering these criticisms was itself interpreted by certain readers as a de facto attack on the institution of public schooling, the students who attend there, and/or the teachers who work there. (But Note: if you're looking for it, the criticism of my "Virtue" post didn't show up in the comments there; it showed up in the comments of the "Gaining" post.) And I'm by no means the first homeschooling parent to whom this has happened: one of my commenters in the "Gaining" post, who uses the handle of "Dawn", put it very well:

...I've found that sometimes just talking about the positives of homeschooling seems to make people defensive. At times they hear things I didn't say and think that by talking about my choice, I'm putting theirs down. I think it's an emotional reaction, not a rational one. People hold certain things very dear, like public schools, and are hyper-sensitive to those who don't feel the same.

Part of the issue stems from the very structure of these defensive arguments. How does one begin to answer a charge levied against homeschoolers? Well, just about any answer to any question in the above list would look like the following, in the abstract:

• State the charge as accurately and completely as possible. After all, we don't want to make an inadvertent straw-man argument; we want to refute the real thing.
• Make sure all the terms are defined well enough to avoid ambiguity. For example, if we're confronting the "socialization issue", we need to know--are we talking about enculturation, or are we talking about manners, or are we talking about schmoozing? The term "socialization" has many meanings; we have to be clear about which meaning we're using at any given time, and what exactly we're talking about.
• Explore the underlying dynamics of the issue. In the socialization example, we might ask: what are the good forms of socialization, and what are the bad forms? Which environments are conducive to the spread of each? To what end do we wish our children socialized--that is, how do we want them to turn out, and how will the different kinds of socialization help us or hurt us?
• Identify unstated assumptions in the original charge. Does the charge rest on some assumptions about the nature of classroom education, or the nature of the homeschooling environment, or the nature of childhood, that just aren't true? For example: does the charge assume that there are certain universals, true of all children, which are in fact mere social constructs, which could be changed if the children were raised differently?
• If unstated assumptions exist, explore them. If these assumptions are invalid, the entire objection may collapse, or may need to be completely restated. I happen to think this was the case with the objection I answered in my "Virtue" post.
• Ask whether the public schools are in fact subject to the same objections. Here's what I mean. One may level the charge that many homeschoolers do X wrong, but that argument--even if true--becomes much weaker if many public schools are also doing X wrong. For a purely hypothetical example, if some percentage of homeschooled children were growning up illiterate, one could make a serious charge against homeschooling. But this charge would be blunted if the public schools were turning out a similar percentage of illiterate students. While one could still make the argument that homeschooling is flawed, one would be hard pressed to claim that putting the kids back in public school is the answer.
• Ask whether there are any advantages homeschoolers have over public schools, that could be leveraged to answer the challenge. After all, homeschoolers typically have much more flexible schedules; they have very flexible curricula; they have very low student-teacher ratios; they have many opportunities to interact with a broad strata of adults during business hours; they have more time with their parents. Is there any way these advantages could hypothetically be leveraged by a parent, to satisfy the original charge?
• Ask whether there are any disadvantages that homeschoolers have compared to public schools, with respect to the initial challenge, and what homeschoolers could do to mitigate these disadvantages. For example, the schools often have some resources that homeschooling parents do not have: reasonably well-stocked science laboratories, sports teams and facilities; enough warm bodies to field a choir or orchestra; and so forth. However, in many cases it is possible for homeschoolers to come up with work-arounds that do just fine. For the above examples, there are often youth sports leagues and youth musical ensembles available that are community-based instead of school-based; and it is often possible to send teens to junior colleges for access to lab-based science instruction.
• Identify a strategy that will allow the homeschooler to satisfy the challenge. For example, In my "Virtue" post I suggested that homeschoolers can do just fine preparing their children to stand up to peer pressure, so long as they take the time to get their children out into the adult world more often; that peer pressure is mitigated when children have lots of connections to people in all life stages, and not predominantly to people their own age. If this argument is true, it suggests to the parents a tangible strategy to follow, which would provide a satisfactory answer the original charge.
• Check to see if there is any evidence out there that validates the strategy. It's all very well and good that you have a theory of how to do X. But the argument becomes much stronger if someone else, who's been doing X for many years now, can weigh in with an affirmation; or if you can find documented evidence somewhere that X works. For example, I pointed out a couple of news items at the end of my "Gaining" post describing how college admissions offices are increasing their outreach efforts to homeschoolers, and I highlighted the comments of an admissions officer that the formerly-homeschooled students are academically among the best prepared students they have.

Now, note that a complete answer to any one of the charges listed earlier in this post will follow this outline pretty closely; this is pretty standard rhetorical stuff. It may not need to have every item on the above list, but it will have most of them.

However, if a person is very sensitive about criticism of the public schools it's not hard to see how such a person could perceive an attack in such an answer. After all, a defense that follows this outline inevitably explores the avantages that homeschoolers have over public schoolers; inevitably looks for ways that the apparent advantages of public schooling over homeschooling can be neutralized by out-of-the-box thinking; and points out those ways in which the public schools are imperfect, as well. So while such an answer may generate outrage in some quarters, it is in fact entirely fair: it is still a defense against an attack, not an intentional attack itself. To claim that such a defense is out-of-line is to claim that homeschoolers are not permitted to offer a defense of their practices when they are criticized, since all such defenses will say these sorts of things.

So: with all this in mind, I have a few more ground rules to set.

• Just because someone says "this method of education does these things better than that method, and this is why...," that is absolutely not a slander, and is not out-of line. It is in fact an integral part of any defense of homeschooling--and it is also an integral part of any defense of public schooling, as well. No one gets to declare that kind of argument off-limits.
• As I have made clear in previous posts, I have nothing against anyone who works in the public schools, nor any student who attends them, nor any parent who sends their children there. I also believe that homeschooling is not for everyone, just as I believe that public schooling is not for everyone.
• Because of this, I will not entertain accusations of bad faith made in the comments. If I say something that sounds like I'm passing judgement on public school teachers, parents, or students, ask for a clarification. Do not come in with guns blazing, declaring "you need to stop bashing..." or "...you never think about..." or the like. If it sounds like I'm bashing someone, chances are there's been a miscommunication somewhere, because I have no intent of bashing anyone, and because I do my best to keep avoid inflammatory and contemptuous language in these posts. If you ask nicely, I will do everything I can to clarify what I said, and correct things when I misspeak.
• All rules I laid out in my post here are of course still in effect.

I have turned off comments for this post as well.

97th Carnival of Homeschooling is up.

The 97th Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Principled Discovery. My post On Gaining a Quality Education at Home is featured right near the beginning! I'm humbled.

I Never Would Have Thought of That...

One of the joys of parenthood is that things that you take for granted--because they've always been that way--are always new and different to your children, since they're experiencing it all for the first time. As a result, they occasionally see things--or say things--that you would never have thought of, but which--when pointed out--have a definite sort of internal logic to them.

To be sure, there are some things that every generation of kids figures out on their own. For example, we never actually taught our kids to separate their Oreo cookies and eat the filling first. And we never actually taught our kids to put pitted olives on all ten of their fingers at the same time. All kids who actually like Oreos and olives figure those things out on their own, even if no one shows them. They appear to be universal.

But occasionally a kid will have an insight that we adults miss, simply by virtue of the fact that we are adults and have already had the supposedly right way of doing things drilled into our brains from a very young age.

Here's one example. At the Pillowfight Fairy's birthday party, for one of the activities we had the kids decorating small pumpkins (mainly by putting googly eyes on them and having the kids paint them with glitter glue). Now, most of the pumpkins were pretty elaborate. The Fairy decided to go the minimalist route, with nothing more than two googly eyes and a blob of glitter glue for the nose:

Pretty straightforward, actually. A little minimalist, but she had other things on her mind that day. But the Adrenaline Junkie, who's not quite three, had a completely different way of looking at a pumpkin. After all, her last Halloween was when she hadn't yet turned two, and like most kids that age, doesn't have a really long memory about things. She probably didn't remember seeing a real, live jack-o-lantern. All she knew is that she was supposed to put a face on her little pumpkin, and that the big brown thing sticking out of the top of the pumpkin looked a little like a nose:

And I can honestly say, I've never actually thought about putting a face on a pumpkin in quite that orientation before. It makes perfect sense, in a way; after all, the kids were sitting on the ground while doing this, with the pumpkins on the ground in front of them, so the Junkie was looking down at the top of her pumpkin. Why would she think about putting a face on the side? It just seemed natural to her to do it this way. And as a result, she wound up making one of the most original jack-o-lantern faces I've seen in some time (with the possible exception of the young boy present who put one googly eye at the top of the stem and one at the base, making a jack-o-lantern much like what Picasso would have done).

(And no, I don't remember which kid it was. That whole day is one big blur in my memory. I hear this happens more as you get older....)

So here's another example. When I got up from my nap today and came in to the front room, the girls had obviously been playing, and I was presented with the following structure:

Basically, that's a toy phone (a hollow piece of plastic that amplifies your own voice and focuses it into your own ear) that's been set atop two orange caution cones.

My first thought was: I never would have thought to do that. I mean, when I'm playing with my kids I will occasionally stack toys so the kids can knock them down; and we have a set of blocks carved to look like castle wall pieces, so we will occasionally make medieval towns and fortresses with them. But I can honestly say I wouldn't have thought to use the phone as a structural member to join two cones like this. And I can't imagine any circumstances that might have prompted me to even think about making a structure like this. I never would have stopped to consider that the cones could be placed closely enough to allow the phone to connect the tops. I never would have stopped to consider that the cone tops were narrow enough to fit inside the ends of the phone.

Then, my second thought came: Cones are great devices for collecting and focusing sound. And I know from personal experience that the toy phone is really good at capturing the sound of your voice and directing it straight into your ear. (I have learned the hard way never never to yell into the thing). Soooo, putting these facts together, if someone under one cone made some noise--even a very soft one--another someone under the second cone would no doubt hear it very clearly. And then it dawned on me. One of my daughters has been trying to develop a working model of this:



So which of my daughters was it? I don't know. But more than that, I suspect that information is available only on a need-to-know basis, and I clearly don't need to know. They could tell me, but then they'd have to kill me--most likely, with this thing:

You Go, Girl

My dear sister-in-law has entered NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month)! She has committed herself to write a post a day for the entire month of November. I'm quite happy she has decided to do this, because she's a pretty good writer, and I like reading her stuff, and she often keeps us waiting a while between posts, and I need my fixes or I start writing really long and convoluted run-on-sentences.

And she paid me a compliment! She said that I write really long posts. And I do it a lot!

Well, I think it's a compliment, at any rate.

However, after some consideration, I decided not to participate in NaBloPoMo this year. After all, the whole point of NaBloPoMo is to get people to blog more, and there are certain people out there who apparently think that I need to blog less. After all, I did manage to write 31 posts in October, 33 in September, and 18 posts in August (with my blog being created only 15 days before the end of the month), so I'm already averaging slightly more than one post a day. And one of the rules of NaBloPoMo is that you have to post every day. Sometimes the muse deserts me for a day, and sometimes she comes in and just starts whacking me around. So I don't particularly want to subject myself to that rule.

But I'm very flattered by her comment that I "should be an author by now," in reference to NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month challenge. The idea here is that entrants have to write 50,000 words for a new novel by the end of the month. Sounds doable and all, except that I haven't written fiction since highschool (although it would appear there are those who think my homeschooling posts qualify). Hmmm... I'd need to come up with a story idea. Hmm... let's see... no, that would... er...

See, the problem is that very often when I start writing, it goes off somewhere I never intended it to. I occasionally start writing things that are funny or amusing, which by the time I'm done, I and everyone who read it are thoroughly depressed. (I suspect this happened to Shakespeare a lot, like with Romeo and Juliet). And other times it starts out philosophical, and winds up preachy; or it starts out serious and winds up absurd. I think back to my attempts at fiction in high school, and when I think of them, I cringe and thank the Lord that I never actually managed to get anyone else to read them (in one case, because the computer died during a disk write operation, and the story got blasted from the disk. In that case, I can truly declare divine providence was at work, and to this day I am in awe of the magnificent power and love of our beneficient Savior, who delivered me from turning the thing in and making a complete fool of myself).

So I find the idea intriguing. But I suspect if I started it, my wife would be sorely tempted to start building that Mechanical Toe thing I mentioned in my last post and find yet another practical use for it....

More on Backyard Ballistics

Turns out, there's a book with the same name. And I think that it's a really, really fun-looking book, which means you probably shouldn't get it for me--let alone the Pillowfight Fairy.

However, the same author has written several other books about how to make homemade siege engines, including one entitled The Art of the Catapult: Build Greek Ballistae, Roman Onagers, English Trebuchets, and More Ancient Artillery. This one is probably a little less dangerous, because there isn't anything flammable involved. And given our five-year-old's demonstrated interests in this area (not to mention her dad's), it's probably something we'll wind up with one day. Hey, we've got a big backyard (though, maybe not quite big enough....)

(My wife just piped up with: "Well, it depends on just how big you build these things," to which I reply, "That's exactly the point!")

I also love the title of yet another of his books: Whoosh Boom Splat: The Garage Warrior's Guide to Building Projectile Shooters. Of all the projects in this book, the really fun-looking one is the "Mechanical Toe"--a bungee-powered kicking machine. It might not be particularly useful, unless one feels like one needs a good kicking on one's backside and there's no one around to administer it, but it would still be cool to have.

(My wife just mentioned that it might be useful if you were constructing a giant game of Mousetrap. Did I mention before that she's the practical one of the family?) :-)

Evasive Maneuvers! Full Starboard Rudder!

Saw this picture, and loved it. Can't exactly say why, but I loved it.

Apparently our warships are expected to go through periodic trials to make sure all the systems--like the rudders--are still working. But I'm just glad they got all the planes (and the people!) off the deck before they did this.

As I was looking at this picture, I started thinking of appropriate captions to go with it:

• "That's it, son, you're not getting the keys back until you learn not to do doughnuts in the harbor."
• "No, Seriously, officer; this big sperm whale jumped out right in front of me and I had to swerve to avoid it."
• "...and the people all said, Sit down; Sit down yer rockin' the boat..."
• "Wait, wait... we need some people to go to the other side of the boat now. Other side!"

Well. Anyone else have any additional captions? Especially The McMullen Family? I'd love to hear them.

Time to Set Some Ground Rules

Update: Turns out that the anonymous commenter that I thought was my brother, was actually his spouse. My bad. I have edited the post accordingly.



One thing that we homeschooling parents learn very quickly is that there are plenty of people out there who think our views on education are flat-out offensive.

And it isn't hard to see why. After all, no one homeschools unless they think they can do a better job of teaching their children than professional teachers can. If Tonya and I thought that the local public schools were the best choice for our children, the Pillowfight Fairy would be in a traditional Kindergarten right now.

It's not hard to imagine that a dedicated teacher, who trained for years preparing for his or her carreer, who does a huge amount of work preparing lesson plans, grading papers, and dealing with parents in addition to teaching classrooms full of students each day, would feel indignant at some yahoo who last saw the inside of a classroom years ago declaring one day, "I can do it better."

And because the subject is so important, and so central to raising of children, it's really easy for people to see other people's decisions on this as a personal insult, or as elitist and exclusionary. "You are making that decision? Well, we're making this decision, and we think this is the best." Although this is often not what the speaker intended to convey, this is what listeners are primed to hear. This is one subject where I actually think it is inevitable that anyone with an opinion will be misunderstood. It comes so close to one's own core beliefs, that it's a bit like talking politics or talking religion; sooner or later, someone with different values, or even just a different perspective on the same values, is going to disagree vehemently with whatever path you take.

There's a lot of bad blood between the public schools and homeschoolers. The homeschoolers, after all, have turned down the public schools for various reasons; some of these reasons are (as I said before) flat-out offensive to those who labor in and those who support the schools. And the schools, in turn, believe that the homeschoolers are not merely unqualified to educate their children, their existence is in fact actively damaging to the public school and its mission--views that, in turn, are offensive to homeschoolers.

Because of this dynamic, it's pretty common for homeschooling parents to have strained relationships with plenty of other people in their families and social circles. Nearly every homeschooler has had the experience of mentioning their educational choices in some otherwise appropriate social setting, only to be set upon immediately by a loved one (or even a complete stranger!) saying, "But what about their socialization? You'll wind up raising a social misfit!" or "What makes you think you can do that? You're not quailified!" or "You know, you're being elitist, and you're damaging the public schools with your choices." These comments are not invitations to a dialog, they are calls to repentance.

And I don't mean to let homeschoolers off the hook here, either; there are plenty of our number who take on a very arrogant attitude about the public school system. But they are far outnumbered by the other side, simply by virtue of the fact that there are a lot more people involved with the public schools than there are in homeschooling.

For the record:

• I have nothing but respect for public school teachers as a group. My mother was one; my younger brother is one, as is his wife; my father was one very briefly in the early nineties; and my other sister-in-law did some substitute teaching for a while. I have seen the stacks of papers they bring home to grade on a nightly basis; I've seen the work they have to do in preparing lesson plans; and all I can say is, God bless you.
• I have no problem with parents who decide to put their children in the public schools. For many parents and many children, this is the right option.
• I genuinely believe that most public schools are doing their best to live up to their mission, often under difficult social and financial conditions.
• I do not believe that homeschooling is for everyone.

But even though I accept all this, and try to make sure that my posts on homeschooling avoid giving any impression to the contrary, it really isn't possible to discuss the topic--especially to describe why Tonya and I decided to homeschool our own children--without occasionally coming off as though we're blasting the public schools. In actuality, our reasons have very little to do with the public schools.

I received several comments on yesterday's post that had a very offended tone to them--two of which from family members whom I love very much. My aunt said, "It's not fair to bash those who don't [homeschool]...." Auntie Jean, I looked over that post several times before and after I read your comment, and I can't find the place where I bashed those who don't homeschool.

And my younger brother (I assume it was my younger brother, even though it was an anonymous comment, because he referred to Auntie Jean by name, and because only he can strike that exact tone) sister-in-law (who apparently can strike exactly the same tone as can my brother) had accusatory lines in his her comment like the untrue "there are different learning styles that you never event [sic] think about," and the sarcastic "Now I have to go to work--to teach high school students history and hopefully inspire them to enjoy it. While they are living in the "real world.""

These two posts, and a third by someone with the handle of Jason, proceeded to throw the entire litany of objections to homeschooling at me:

• If families pull their kids out to homeschool them, it hurts the public schools and the teachers who work in them.
• It's selfish to do this, since for some kids that's their only option.
• Education in this country has evolved from homeschooling to one-room schooling, to public schooling; so going back to homeschooling would be a reversal of progress.
• Selectively pulling out of the public schools is elitist and unfair to those who can't.
• The public schools need the support of educated parents for the benefit of uneducated kids
• Homeschoolers don't know how to handle reading disabilities.
• We're unaware of alternate teaching/learning styles.
• Public schools prepare kids better by putting them in more lifelike situations.
• Homeschoolers don't get exposed as much to people of different ethnicities.
• Christians need to understand the culture if they are to reach out to people.
• Homeschoolers are more likely to present only one side of any argument.
• Homeschooling hinders the formation of a common culture.

Man alive! Where to begin?

Well, here are a couple of things to note about the above list of objections:

1. None of them is new. I've heard every one of those before, in one form or another. Part of the lot in life of a homeschooler is that you have to defend yourself, answering the same questions, over and over and over....
2. These questions have been kicked around by the homeschooling community for some time now. Nearly all of these questions have well-worn answers to them. I suspect, if I wanted to, I could write a complete column, of similar length to yesterday's column, on any one of them. In fact, that's a pretty good idea. You've just given me many, many more ideas for stuff to write and submit to the Carnival of Homeschooling. They'll eat it up. Thanks! :)
3. Most importantly for this post, not one of those objections was actually on topic. The column I wrote yesterday was about the ability of Homeschoolers to provide an education of similar or superior quality to the one they would receive in the public schools. Now, Andy Carolyn brought up a point where I legitimately overstepped the point I was trying to make; which I have acknowledged in the comments there. And if anyone wished to question the reasoning I used, or provide counterexamples, they were welcome to do that. But for the most part, those three comments didn't engage my reasoning, they merely started blasting the decision to homeschool, with whatever arguments the commenters had at hand.

And Auntie Jean then went on to say, "It's not fair to bash those who don't [homeschool] or continue to hold up the virtues of homeschooling when it is not for everyone...." meaning, I take it, that she doesn't want me to blog about our reasons for homeschooling anymore.

Auntie Jean, I love you and respect you, but if I'm understanding you right, that comment was way out of line.

The fact is that the desire to write about homeschooling is one of the main reasons I started this blog. One thing to understand about the homeschooling movement is that it is, in large part, powered by the internet. One homeschooling parent will write about some aspect of raising and educating a child, and this advice and experience then edifies, encourages, and advises a whole host of other parents; these parents then write about their experiences and ideas, and it edifies the whole group, and so on. This conversation--which has been going on for years now--has allowed a certain solidarity to form within the homeschooling movement, even though there are many different philosophies, goals, ideologies, and methods in use within the movement. For the person who's interested and wants to learn about the homeschooling movement--what it's about, what motivates it, the different philosophies and methods in use--there is a huge amount of information available, written by the people who are actually doing it. Tonya and I have learned a huge amount by listening in on this conversation. This blog is, in part, intended to be my contribution back to the conversation; adding Tonya's and my thoughts into the mix; taking things that I think other people are saying, and rewording them to make sure I understand them, then feeding them back in case it edifies some other parent who's just starting out.

I get the sense from the comments--especially the one, "it's not fair to ... continue to hold up the virtues of homeschooling when it is not for everyone," that you don't think my writing about homeschooling is somehow legitimate. That the very fact that I'm using my blog to do what I can to build and strengthen the homeschooling movement is wrong, because the movement itself is wrong; that too many people are doing it already, and I'm just encouraging them. It sounds as though this is what you're saying. And if this is in fact the case, then I'm sorry--but that train has already left the station. Tonya and I believe that homeschooling is a perfectly moral and viable option, that produces good academic and social results, and that there are plenty more parents out there that could in fact do this successfully, and that the movement deserves to grow.

So as the title of this post says, it's "Time to Set Some Ground Rules:"

• I'm going to continue blogging about homeschooling--especially its virtues, and its challenges--because it's important to us, and because it's important to many of the people who read this blog.
• When I do blog about homeschool matters, people who disagree with me are free to comment, so long as:
• They remain respectful of me, and of their fellow commenters, at all times.
• They remain on topic. I will not permit off-topic criticisms. If I write a post about the academic aspects of homeschooling, I will delete any comments that--for example--ignore this topic and just complain about the way we socialize our kids.
• I will also not permit gratuitous bashing of the public schools, the teachers, or the students. After all, there are some public school teachers in my own family, who I love and respect very much. If there is a substantive point to be made about how one method is superior to the other, I will consider that acceptable, as long as it is done without rancor.
• I reserve the right to delete any comment that offends my sensibilities. I also reserve the right to turn on comment moderating at any time. This is my blog, after all.
• If you are convinced that homeschooling is a bad idea and that nothing will change your mind, my blog is not the venue to make your case. Get your own blog.
• If a defense of homeschooling offends you that much, it might not be a good idea to visit this blog--or if you do visit, try to skip the homeschooling posts. They'll generally be the longest ones.

Sorry to be so harsh. I recognize that we're discussing a topic that's very sensitive to some people, and it's hard to do it without making a whole lot of people offended. However, I could see--from yesterday's post, and from some earlier ones--which directions things would go if I didn't step up. This is unabashedly a homeschooling blog, and was intended to be from the beginning.

I have turned off comments for this post.