Gingerbread Houses With the Homeschool Group

How NOT to Criticize Homeschooling...

I ran across the following anti-homeschooling rant online. This is a direct quote and I found it quite educational.

"I'm the narrow minded person that still feel that a child should go to public school because they are out with other people to their own age and I feel that keeping a child from school hinders their social skills and teachers take a long time in school to learn how to teach children annnnnd parents most of them are ill equiped to keep up with children in school because their parents don't know enough to teach their children at home unless your a teacher!"

How to totally undermine your own argument, look like an ignorant idiot, and make homeschoolers laugh hysterically at your anti-homeschooling convictions:

1. Use horrible grammar and spelling.
I don't have perfect grammar and spelling all the time, either.  I'm human.  We're all human.  And some of us are just bad at written English.  That's fine.  But if you're going to be criticizing someone's educational choices, you might want to try extra hard to sound educated yourself.

2. While you're at it, just forget periods all together.
Nothing says, "I'm an ignorant troll on the internet" like ignoring basic sentence structure rules.

3. But if you're going to use any ending punctuation, make sure it's an exclamation point.
When I see that all I hear in my head is, "I know nothing about this issue but I'm passionate so that counts for something so you should take me seriously!!"

Now to finally get to the meat of the rant:

4. Bring up the socialization argument.
This issue is a non-issue and it isn't a new concept to homeschoolers.  We've all heard it a million times.  And anecdotally, we've all personally seen it debunked a million times.  The idea that kids should be only with kids their own age in order to learn proper social skills is especially hilarious.
I won't bore you here with the counter argument.  But if you're truly interested in the other perspective, just search some homeschool blogs (like mine or ones on my side bar) for "socialization."
And if you're still concerned about the socialization issue and you want to discuss it, then how about quote some facts and share some links and research?  Even specific anecdotal evidence is good to get a discussion going (provided both parties understand that anecdotal evidence can't necessarily be generalized to large populations).  I appreciate opinions backed up with data.

5. Insult parents' intelligence.
No one likes to be told they are too stupid to teach basic addition and must go to college for 5 years in order to find out how to do it.  That just makes people defensive.


I've said it before and I'll say it again that I don't care if you put your kid in public school.  I love to hear about public schools and public school teachers who are doing a wonderful job.  I'm not going to generalize that "all public school is bad" so please be respectful in turn.  Every child, family, community, and school is different.  We should all have the freedom to choose what we feel is best without ignorant, unproductive, unfounded criticism.

Beowulf Costume

In September we read about Beowulf in Story of the World, volume 2.  Tertius usually isn't terribly interested in listening to our history lessons, but that day he was very glad that he stuck around!  A super strong warrior who fights a monster with his bare hands?  Right up this boy's ally!

When I asked the kids soon after what they wanted to be for Halloween, he was positive he wanted to be Beowulf.  In our Story of the World student pages, there was a Beowulf coloring page so we based his costume on that.

A long piece of brown fabric made a loin cloth and bracers. I used a sharpie to draw muscles on a white shirt. Finally, we needed a wolf hide for our fierce warrior to wear.  The closest we had was this big teddy bear.  I think it worked pretty well.  Though, Hubby may have wanted to hold a funeral for his poor old stuffed animal.