Smrt Lernins

I know, I know. Worst blogger ever.

There’s a certain part of me that hates to leave this blog lying fallow after two years of regular posting, but I’ll be honest, I just don’t feel as safe sharing information about myself or my family on this blog any more. The incident with the fundie “friend” towards the end of last school year was really the first of a series of events that has me rethinking how much I really want to write here. A particularly nasty comment left on an older entry during the summer, right around the time I was going to get the blog up and kicking again, kind of drove it home.

The internet is full of assholes. Do I really want to share my life with those assholes?

I’ve always been a huge proponent of blogging in general and of homeschool blogging specifically. I’ve also never been one to curb my tongue (or technically, my fingers) about my feelings on certain issues. I know my opinions aren’t always popular, and mostly, that doesn’t bother me. I’m so used to being the odd (wo)man out that having uncommon or unpopular opinions isn’t a new or strange experience. I stand by my words and typically don’t mind defending them, though I draw the line at approve comments whose only goal is to insult/detract/be douchey. When I change my mind about something, I don’t have a problem recanting any previous statements.

I do have a problem putting my life, my self, my family, my thoughts out there when the result is that people are going to be personally nasty. There are people out there who don’t deserve this window into my life, and I’ve been willing to ignore those people because the positive feedback has outweighed the negative.

Now? I don’t really feel as safe. I feel more private. I feel resentful of those people who don’t have anything productive to add, but sure as hell have an ugly word about how I’m doing it wrong. I just don’t know that it’s worth it. I don’t know that it’s worth stirring the pot when what floats to the surface is crap.

That is how rumors get started.

So, I haven’t been around in a while. I guess a few of you might have noticed, because I got a couple of “hey, where’d you go” and “I hope everything’s ok” comments, which is very sweet of y’all. To answer the questions:

Q) Where did you go?
A) To hell in a handbasket (but only figuratively, Rapture not withstanding).

Q) Is everything ok?
A) Yes, but also crazy.

Having a fourth child in the house, coupled with things like the end of the school year, some drama with Officer Daddyman’s work (furloughs aren’t exactly conducive to humor), my new commitment to personal health, and a newfound addiction to Glee fanfiction (for which I blame patchfire), I haven’t been in a blogging mindset. I’m just freaking tired, y’all. I do my best to be either funny, insightful/inciteful, or some combination of both, but I haven’t been able to muster up the energy for any of that over the last month or so.

Here’s what’s been up with us the last month-ish. I/we have:

• Finished our school year (technically, the 180 days is over), but Captain S still has a little more science and math to wrap up before he’s done w/ the subjects.
• Did our first round of standardized testing as homeschoolers (which was dramatic in its own right — will elaborate on that in a later post)
• Wrapped up our second season of soccer. Captain S enjoyed it and actually put in some effort this year. Tank actually shows some real athletic ability, which completely flabbergasts me, since I have none and don’t know what to do about it. Luckily, Officer Daddyman is a nice Midwestern yankee boy who grew up playing soccer, so at least someone around here isn’t sports-incapable.
• Completed the 30 Day Shred. More on that once the dress of doom is purchased, but suffice it to say, it was a HUGE accomplishment for the couch potato that was Smrt Mama McLernins.
• Watched our county commissioners refuse to raise the millage rate in order to continue fully staffed and equipped public services and tell the police department (whose budget is 96% salary) to cut 10% from its budget. They negotiated down to a <4% cut, which still means 40 furloughed hours between May and September. They've already had their overtime taken away. They've already gone without salary step increases or cost of living increases for a few years now. I'm grateful for Daddyman's promotion to FTO (so we had a slight salary increase this year) and his continued ability to get decent part-time jobs. I'm not grateful that our county commissioners would rather get reelected than take care of cops, firemen, and other county services.

And really, that’s just some of it.

I’ve got some stuff in the mental works. I need to report on my failed Four Books a Month in April (seriously, I didn’t manage it). I need to tell you about the dress of doom. I should talk about the testing debacle. All of that will have to wait, though. Right now, just know that I’m not dead. That’s as good as it gets.

I’m very excited to say that I will be teaching again starting in the fall! I really enjoyed the two semesters I spent teaching writing through the various co-ops, and I’ve been looking for a venue to teach again. I won’t be teaching writing in the ‘11-’12 year, though. I’ll be teaching blogging and “digital literacy.”

Here are my course descriptions from the online catalogue, if you can indulge me a bit, for Digital Literacy:

Email, instant messenger, Facebook, forums, blogs – our children have so many ways to reach out to other people with similar interests and wide array of backgrounds. Being online means being part of a large and vibrant community, but like any community, the online world has its own rules, social expectations, and occasional dangerous elements. Do your children have the skills they need to be smart and safe digital citizens?

Digital literacy is the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and analyze information using digital technology. More than that, it’s the knowledge of how to traverse the Internet safely, how to interact with others online in a way that is polite and appropriate, and what information they should or shouldn’t share. Students will learn the basics of email, safe web navigation, distinguishing between reliable and unreliable websites (a useful tool for research), online etiquette, and how to be a responsible online “citizen.”

And Blogging 101:

Are your children reluctant writers? Are they technophiles who are more comfortable behind a computer than in front of a crowd? Do they have a lot of subject-area knowledge they would like to share with others? Blogging is the perfect format to let them share their thoughts and to develop their passion for writing!

Blogging is a meaningful way to add your voice to the Great Conversation happening all around us. Students will establish and maintain a personal blog, participate in a class blog, learn basics of HTML, and generate content for their blogs that includes text, links, and embedded images and videos. They will learn online etiquette as they comment on others’ blogs and manage comments on their own blogs (with adult guidance). Parents will be provided links to class blogs and access to their students’ blogging accounts (unless declined).

Yeah, they’re a little hokey, but the point is to get parents to want to enroll their children, right? Plus, I really do believe blogging is both valid and valuable (perhaps especially for homeschoolers). I may have mentioned before that I spent two years working for a NCLB-funded grant initiative called Blog2Learn, where I taught middle and high school teachers how to integrate blogging into their (mostly low performing/at risk) classrooms. We had a lot of success with the program in terms of increasing writing output and improving writing quality. I’ve also taught a grown-up version of Blogging 101 (and the follow up, predictably called Blogging 102) at conferences. I feel pretty comfortable and competent in this area.

If I get parental consent, I may share some links to students’ blogs or to our class blog over the course of the school year, starting in the fall. Hopefully you’ll indulge me a little and give them some positive feedback.

Saturday seems like a good day for linking, so here are a few good ones that have come across my desk* this morning:

• Hold your babies close. You aren’t spoiling them (really, you can’t spoil a baby), but you may be giving them a better ability to recover from fights with future partners.
• While the Egyptian revolution wasn’t really a “Facebook/Twitter revolution,” social media did play an important role in revolutionaries’ ability to communicate with each other and the world. In return, the Egyptian revolution taught Al Jazeera how to embrace digital media and social networking to better report the news as it happened.
• NP-in-training and abortion provider Dolores P. provides an honest look into what it’s like to be an abortion provider, sharing her personal experiences on both ends of the table. While her humor is a little morbid, especially where her own life and health are concerned, she is completely respectful of the women coming into her office. [Just a note here, Smrt Lernins is a pro-choice blog; while I am happy to engage in a wide array of discussions, one thing I won't tolerate is anti-choice comments.]
• The next time your kids are climbing the walls, just remember, they could always be literally climbing the walls.
• The eastern cougar has been declared extinct. Sadness.
• See? I’m not the only one calling the “mommy wars” a bunch of BS. The Bloggess says so, too. Of course, she also probably offends everyone in the process, but that’s her MO, so if you’ve got punkin’ feelins, apply elsewhere.
• Ok, women. Are you pissed off yet? (and please, don’t give me the “that’s why I’m glad I don’t live in GA/the South” response — similar bills have been introduced in South Dakota, Utah, Nevada, and probably some other states, too — this isn’t a Southern problem; it’s a religious right wingnut problem)
• Also, lets stop portraying women as disposable while we’re at it.
• Patchfire has been posting videos every day. Some educate, some entertain, some delight, some just make you say “oh HAIL YEAH.” Please go enjoy and comment, letting her know how much you enjoy her little project for March.

There you go, folks. Some links to make you think, to make you glad or mad, to make you read something or watch something a little different. Enjoy (or not. Whatever. Do what you want. I’m not the boss of you.)

*Yes, I have an actual desk. It’s an IKEA Expedit and I luff it. It is currently piled high with crap that was on our old bookshelves, but which hasn’t yet been situated in our new bookshelves (also Expedit).

I’ve had a lot of new readers on the blog lately, many of them not homeschoolers (and some of them not even parents at all).

I don’t think I over-glorify homeschooling. I really try not to. I know I have a strong pro-homeschool bias and that comes out in my posts. We’ve been through multiple different school settings before coming to homeschooling as the best option, so I feel like I’m usually writing from a good basis of experiences. If I make homeschooling seem easy or a constant stream of enlightenment and super-duper fun, please forgive me for presenting it thusly. It ain’t necessarily so.

Here is the blog’s honest truth: Sometimes it really, really sucks to be a homeschooler. The last two days have been those days. For the record, trying to homeschool with a pounding migraine is far from fun. Basic parenting stuff is difficult with a migraine; now add teaching lessons and checking work and driving around signing up for homeschool soccer on top of that. Not fun. Homeschooling does contain a lot of fun and enlightenment, and sometimes it’s even a little bit easy, but it also has a whole stinking heaping of “suck it up.”

I really wanted to write something else riveting to keep my new readers coming back for more, but right now I think I’d rather prefer my new readers coming over and taking turns pouring shots of scotch down my throat…and I don’t even like scotch. It’s been that kind of past two days.

I am running dry of brilliant new ideas, y’all. Migraine-brain isn’t very good for that. Any suggestions? How about y’all talk amongst yourselves?

Some of you already know about Secular Thursday, the day when secular homeschoolers (whatever that means to you) can come together and talk about issues and experiences that are relevant to your lives. Over the past two years, the Secular Thursdays (#secthurs if you’re Tweeting about it) movement has grown, until we have a pretty impressive list of bloggers writing, at least occasionally, Secular Thursday thoughts to share with the blogosphere.

Secular Thursday isn’t popular with everyone. Of course, there’s the objection from the non-secular set, but even within the self-identifying secular homeschooling community, people have taken issue with the idea of Secular Thursday. I’ve received comments with a varying degree of tone (ranging from holier-than-thou to passive aggressive to downright nasty) from people who think Secular Thursday is too negative, that the goal is to offend or mock people with other views, that we’re making a mountain out of a molehill when we say it’s hard to find materials and support for a secular viewpoint in homeschooling.

You know, sometimes our posts can be negative. Many aspects of the world seem stacked against a secular education, favoring religion over scientific evidence. Sometimes, however, our posts are downright joyful. Sometimes we do have to mock or poke fun a little bit — it’s a natural response to the attitude that we, the secular/non-religious, are morally lacking or inferior, that because we don’t choose in include God in our curricula, that our children are growing up without guidance or character. It’s hard to live in a world comprised of people who think we’re going to hell; if we need to blow off a little steam, what of it? As my Momma puts it, you can get glad in the same pants you got mad in.

It hasn’t gotten any easier to not be a Christian in this country. It’s not getting any easier. Religion still has a too-strong hold on our laws. We live in a country where a pharmacist can deny a woman’s access to life-saving medication because he thinks she might have had an abortion, where gay people are denied the right to marry or adopt children because it offends someone’s narrow view of the fantasy of “traditional” marriage, where science texts are rewritten to include the decided non-scientific Creationist/Intelligent Design beliefs and history texts are rewritten to gloss over the ugly bits…well, don’t tell me that being secular in general — let alone a secular homeschooler, let along a secular homeschooler in the South — is always easy-peasy and that we’re practically dripping with support.

Secular Thursday is my way of reminding myself that I’m not alone in this. I’m not the only one who feels on the “outside,” who is frustrated by what I see on the “inside,” who would like access to a wider range of materials, who would like access to a wider range of groups and services, who sometimes feels like the world might be going to hell in a handbasket (if you happen to believe in hell, which I don’t), or who just plain wants to talk about stuff that the majority of the folks on the WTM forums don’t want to hear about and can’t behave themselves if you do talk about it. I’m not alone. All of these folks are with me:

• Smrt Mama at Smrt Lernins @smrtlernins
• Patchfire at A Little Rebellion @patchfire
• Rational Jenn @rationaljenn
• Cara at Peanuts are EVIL… @nolamom76
• Bobbi at My Little Soapbox @mylittlesoapbox
• Sarah at Raising Three Thinkers @raisingthinkers
• Lesa at Free K-12 Education @SimplisticLivin
• Renae at Home Education Family
• Luna at Spiral Goddess Home School @lunaskye
• WildIris at By The Way
• Crunchy Mama at The Diosa Dotada Endeavor
• Kim at Embracing My Chaos
• Queen Bee at Lost Persons Homeschool
• Lili at The Neustel Way
• Debbie at School Bytes
• verpaix at Le vert, couleur de la paix @vertpaix
• Meghan at Strader Spiel
• Heather at This Adventure Life
• Dysfuntional Homeschooler
• Julie at Creekside Learning
• Mummy Snow at Snowflakes in the Valley
• Samantha at The Scientific Homeschooler
• justamouse at just a mouse house
• Natalie at Homeschool for Two
• Siggi at Turkeydoodles

If you aren’t on this list and want to be, let me know. If you’ve become disenchanted with the idea of Secular Thursday and want off the list, let me know. If you want to bitch about Secular Thursday, you go right on ahead; it doesn’t hurt my feelings, but it sure doesn’t change my mind. If you aren’t sure what you think about Secular Thursdays, read about it. Read through my Secular Thursday posts, read through Patchfire’s, read through the others on the list. Our points of view are as varied as yours.

Yesterday, my unbroken NaBloPoMo streak was broken by the frustration that is “my internets is down!” Instead of writing about our beautiful Thanksgiving, which was as awesome as I’d have hoped, I’m going to celebrate this Black Friday by bitching about AT&T’s technical support and technology in general.

I’ll preface this by saying that my daddy is an executive director at AT&T. He has worked in the industry for about five million years, long before personal computers came about. That whole “Al Gore claims he invented the internet” thing? Well, my daddy actually built the internet, or the physical framework for it, anyway. When the first home computer came out, he brought one home, disassembled it, and put it back together…and made it faster. There is nothing my daddy cannot fix, computerly-speaking.

My daddy talked me through as much troubleshooting as possible over texting, then directed me to tech support. I called tech support and, after navigating an absurd assortment of menus, managed to get a woman who identified herself as [possibly] Eva. I wrote down “Eva” on my little note pad, in case I needed to know. I didn’t realize until a little later into the call that possibly-Eva had an accent of a type with which I am not familiar (she turned out to be in the Philippines) and she pronounced a few words oddly, so her name might not have actually been Eva at all. I’ll continue to call her “possibly-Eva” for the duration of this post.

Possibly-Eva didn’t seem to know very much about tech stuff for a tech support call center. She was clearly working from a script and any variation from that confused her. We spent an hour on the phone together before we got disconnected and she didn’t call back, despite asking for a call-back number in case we got disconnected. The high points of that hour included her insisting that “admin/password” were a very good username/password combination, because I won’t forget them, her coaching me through reconfiguring my router so poorly that my father had to spend an hour reconfiguring it again today, and her asking if I could “go upstairs and ask [my] dad for the router information” (to which I responded, “Um…he doesn’t live here, because I’m in my 30s, and this is my house.”). A service ticket was never opened for my issues.

My father had to call the support center himself to even get a service ticket. Let me remind you, he’s an executive director in this company, and they didn’t want to give him a ticket. He had to call again the next day to get a technician out to my house, at which point he was told it would be another four days before that would happen (and he did something he rarely does and which I never ask him to do, play the “do you know [x very high level manager over the technician's department] — well, he and I are peers and friends, and I’m happy to escalate this to him if I have to” card). A tech was at my house a few hours later, which is apparently a miracle. He was very nice, fixed some problems outside, fixed some problems inside, and when he left, the guys (my daddy and Officer Daddyman) turned out computers nothing would work. *headdesk*

They work on it for another half hour and can’t get it working. They go back over and work on it later and VOILA! It works.

We come home from my parents’ house and my laptop works on the newly reestablished network just fine. Daddyman turns on his computer and tries to connect and CRASH, there goes the network. Texted my daddy, rebooted the router, but nada. At my daddy’s instructions, turned off Daddyman’s computer, rebooted the router, and as you see, I am now online.

Beware: Officer Daddyman’s computer eats the internet! This is most definitely an Eff Off Friday.

I don’t know if it’s due to the relinking of some of my recent posts or the new traffic to the blog or I’ve just finally been around long enough to be somewhat on the radar, but my spam quotient on this blog is way up the last week or so, even w/ Akismet. I’ve switched comments to completely moderated for the time being, until I can get some things squared away and the trolls become bored enough to wander back underneath their bridges.

If your comments don’t appear right away, do not despair (not that you’d actually despair, but humor me, will you?)! Unless you’re a spammer or just can’t behave yourself, I don’t make a habit of refusing to approve comments, even the ones with which I disagree. What’s the point of putting my words out there if I’m not willing to entertain any discourse on them? I can write for my own pleasure anywhere; Smrt Lernins is about being a part of the Great Conversation.

This comes with a caveat, a mighty big one at that: If you can’t behave yourself, if you use my blog as a means of personally attacking me or my readers, if you lack civility and write condescendingly to my readers, if you attempt to batter your point home through a massage barrage of comments, or if you decide to leave nasty remarks on a post that’s older than, say, six months or so (because, really, if you can’t get into a snit in a timely fashion, why should I play along?), then I probably won’t approve them. We are a decent sort of folks here at Smrt Lernins.

Jon Stewart put it best when he said, “Don’t be douchey.” Take that to heart.

So, I’ve been doing this whole blogging thing for about 13 months now, and am now (including this post) two posts shy of my 300th post! I think that calls for some manner of celebration. Perhaps I’ll bake a pan of these (because while I’m not all that gaga for The Pioneer Woman, I am pretty darn gaga for cinnamon rolls).

I’m also at close to 2000 non-spam comments! You like me! You really like me! Or you hate me, which, in the blogosphere, plays out in about the same way — lots of comments, some relinking, a little smack-talking (or a little butt-smacking, whatever floats your barges) and a great conversation.

I’ve covered a few controversial topics that generated some great discussion (seriously, who know that libraries were such a source of passionate debate?). I’ve written a lot more humdrum posts that generated one or two half-hearted “sounds like a great day” comments. I’ve made one post that resulted in a flood of spam from angry WAHMs who could benefit from a copyeditor (though, who couldn’t?) and some Xanax. I’ve discovered that some homeschoolers feel very strongly about their commas, their choice of dictionaries, and the word “teach”.

Now what?

I’d like to get back to regular “Ask a [Smrt] Homeschooler” and Secular Thursday posts. I want to finish the Secular Homeschool Archetypes series. I want to get back into a habit of reading and commenting on everyone else’s blog (in fact, comment with your favorite post you’ve ever written on YOUR blog so I can read it!) and have some more guest posts.

What else? Where do I go from here? What makes a blog interesting these days?

First world problems alert: my internet has been down for almost a week* and, with homeschool starting on Monday, I’m starting to panic a little. Two of Captain Science’s classes (computer programming and science) and one he and Tank are sharing (art) are online. We still have some pieces of curricula to order. We need to sign up for the homeschool soccer league. We might sign up for classes at a local co-op (since we aren’t hosting one this semester, a nice respite). We need more consistent internet for this kind of stuff!

Officer Daddyman made a rather irritable comment to me the other night, being a bit tired of hearing me carry on about how inconvenienced I am, about people having survived just fine before the internet. Of course, the same could be said for, say, refrigeration (did I mention our fridge was also on the fritz?) and telephones (oh yeah, same electrical storm that fried our internet killed our phones) and electric lights (our house gremlin has been blowing those like crazy, too) and air conditioning (thankfully, this still works, though with 100 degree outside temperatures, it’s not making too much of a dent in the heat). Once you’ve become accustomed to and built certain facets of your life around access to those things, however, having them suddenly take flight into the wimbly ether is rather…fraktastic. Can’t put it more eloquently or eruditely (or less geekily) than that.

More than the resources, however, I miss the “s word.” Socialization. We usually worry about our kids getting enough, but as a in-the-home-all-day Mama (because I don’t like that whole “work at home” vs. “stay at home” thing…all mamas work), I often pine for some adult time. Chatting online with Patchfire and The Mama and my other homeschooling (and non-homeschooling) mama friends is an important part of my life. It’s a way of swapping ideas and just generally staying sane. It’s lonely at 11pm when Daddyman is at work and I want the house to stay quiet (so no phone calls), but I can’t talk to someone online, read any news, listen to any new music, etc.

*sigh* Hopefully, we’ll have internet by Monday, because how on earth can I go without blogging about our first day of school? Oh internet! I don’t know how to quit you.

*I’m swiping a little wireless from my grandmother while drinking a glass of wine.