Here’s our First Standardized Testing as Homeschoolers brag section: He scored in the 99th% in vocabulary, usage and expression, math concepts and estimation (he actually got 100% of this section correct), and maps and diagrams. He has, according to this test, the language usage, map/diagram reading skills, and math concepts of a college student. Despite having never had any American history, he even managed to score in the 68th% (average) in social studies. His capitalization and punctuation scores could be higher, but a) these are the two areas where he knows what’s correct, but legitimately doesn’t give a crap and b) I’m pretty certain that’s around the point in time of the first day when he and Natasha started making paper airplanes*. Even in those areas, though, he scored at or above grade level, just not as high as his practical performance suggests he’s capable of doing.

The bragging portion is over and the WTF portion is beginning: Because then there’s the math computation score of 18th%.

Something isn’t right here. He missed no questions in the concepts/estimation section and only four questions in the problem solving/data interpretation section. I have a hard time believing he can’t do basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division and that he remembers nothing from the fractions and decimals work he aced last year. I was kind of freaking out a little that I’d made my child math stupid this year and he was no longer capable of basic computation. HOMESCHOOL FAIL! My children should be taken away from me.

When I calmed down a little, I realized that probably what happened is that he got off sync with filling in the bubbles or some other such nonsense, because when all the other scores are in the 80th% and above, the statistical outlier is probably more indicative of a screw up with the testing materials and not a total absence of subject-area knowledge. He works with fractions and decimals almost every day that he does math and hasn’t had any problems with them, so while I suppose it’s possible that I’m Mom In Denial of Her Son’s Glaring Education Flaws(tm), I think it’s more likely that Captain Science was Son Who Doesn’t Double-Check His Work Even When Reminded Because He’d Rather Make Paper Airplanes With Natasha Who Is Awesome(tm).

I choose to focus on how, despite the random 18th% score, he still pulled off a 92nd% core/90th% composite score, both of which have a grade equivalence of 9th grade and qualify him as Above Average. We will be doing some capitalization/punctuation refresher work over the summer to make sure he really is up to snuff in those areas, and I think I’ll stick with my plan to proctor our own test next year, to minimize shenanigans.

*No, the test proctoring wasn’t exactly…rigorous.

This isn’t because we haven’t been homeschooling. We have been. It’s primarily that I am simply exhausted from the daily task of pulling a decent amount of work out of Captain Science right now. It’s like pulling teeth. We have maximum “tween” attitude and minimum actual effort being applied towards his school work. It’s also wildly inconsistent. The essay he wrote today had the depth I would expect from a 7 year old. The previous essay, about Theodore Roosevelt, was great. I don’t know if it’s that he thinks he has to be completely interested in and invested in the topic for it to be worth his while, or if he simply can’t be bothered to try, because eh, what’s the worst that can happen?

I do have things I want to write about. I don’t want any advice on things to do to motivate Captain Science (I am resourceful and intelligent; he’s just having one of those phases where nothing is going to make much difference). I really kind of need a vacation from my life for a couple of days.

As an aside, as Captain S trudges away at another version of his essay, Babypie is stark nekkid and trying to convince Badge the Beagle to poop directly into one of the tiny blue poo-scooper bags (without success, thankfully).

Yeah, my first answer would have been “nothing,” too, but now, if you “like” Rosetta Stone Homeschool on Facebook, The Old Schoolhouse magazine will be happy to send you free creationist e-books to befuddle, mislead, and indoctrinate your children into the glorious world of creation non-science. All you have to do is email gena@tosmag.com and you’ll be sent a list of The Curiosity Files e-books from which to choose*.

Personally, I’m having a hard time choosing. Which burning scientific inquiry do I most need answered?

Does the dung beetle really “bring glory to God?”
What does the Bible tell us about MRSA?
Were blue diamonds sent as a special gift to us?
Is the blue-footed booby an “evolution stumper” that “defies the theory of natural selection?”
Can these handy curricula can help hammer home the important fundamentalist idea that “male and female roles [are] very different?”

So hard to choose! *sigh*

Seriously, folks. Pseudo-science like this is insidious. It’s dressed up in fun little packages, but the stuff inside is designed to lead children away from real, evidence-based science. I genuinely pity children who are taught to blindly accept creationism, rather than developing a truly scientific mind and learning to discern fact from fancy, evidence from belief, and science from religion. Let faith be faith and science be science.

*A friend told me about this giveaway, with no info as to the name of the curricula that would be given away, just that it was science. Yes, I suspected that any science e-books given away by TOS would be creationist. However, I was under the impression that Rosetta Stone was a secular curricula, so I’m curious why the “reward” for liking their company’s homeschool curricula branch is a decidedly religious curricula.

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?

I’m also drinking a LARGE glass of wine, so bear with me. Don’t bare with me, though. This is not a pants-optional blog.

So, there’s this online community I read with irregularity (as in, not frequently, not as in I read it when I need to poop). Today, a woman posted this:

hello all. anyone here homeschool? im looking for a affordable online school for children k-4 to start with. where it runs on its own and i get updates on how they are doing. kind of like the douger’s use. if you watch that show. maybe thinking of hs my gurls. of course i have to show the site to my ex and see what he says first, thanx all.

The obvious surface issue with this woman’s desire to homeschool is her poor spelling and grammar, but we’ll just let that one lie. A decent curriculum could help her and her kids, if she were dedicated and involved enough. I’ve learned a lot and expanded my own education through the process of homeschooling, so I fully believe others could do the same, even if they aren’t starting from the same point I was.

No, it’s not her grammatical difficulties that leaped out at me as the glaring problem here. The biggest problem I see is that this mother wants to homeschool her children with no involvement on her part and at little-to-no cost to her. I am immediately put in mind of the project triangle (fast, cheap, good: pick two), only when it comes to homeschooling, those three points on the pyramid would probably be hands-off, inexpensive/free, and thorough. Pick two. You can homeschool with minimal parental involvement (hands-off) and at minimal cost, but the result isn’t going to be a particularly thorough education. You can homeschool on the cheap and do it well, but you aren’t going to be able to do it by plugging your kids into a computer and walking away. You can probably find curricula that are largely hands-off (for the parents, at least) and reasonably thorough, but you bet your ass it isn’t going to be cheap.

You know what is cheap, doesn’t require much parental involvement, and is thorough enough that you can at least feel comfortable that your child is having the basics covered before they graduate? Public school. If you want your child educated without you having to work at it or pay for it, please do your child a favor, and just put her into a public school. She won’t be learning anything at home with a disengaged parent who isn’t willing to invest any time or money into an appropriate curricula. While public schools don’t, on the whole, provide the ideal education for many students, they do at least provide an education that covers all the basic areas. Some public schools even do a really good job (my high school, for example, which is now a magnet school for international studies). Even a subpar school, however, would do a better than than the education received by a Kindergartener and a third grader staring at a computer screen all day while mommy does…what, exactly?

Homeschooling isn’t easy, y’all. It’s usually not cheap. It’s hard work, takes a lot of commitment and planning, and isn’t for someone looking for the easy way to educate children. Even unschoolers (the actual committed variety, not the “I can’t be bothered to make an effort, so we’ll just say we’re unschooling” variety) spent a lot of time interacting with their children, educating them — if in a less formal and traditional manner — and helping enrich their lives. You can’t park your kid in front of Club Penguin all day and call it school. You can’t park them in front of Math Blaster or videos on phonics, either. Human interaction must be part of education. If you can’t do it, please let someone else do it.

Of course, I also take issue to one response to this woman, which said:

I have to be blunt here–as a public school teacher, I get a little resentful when parents think they can give their kid a better education than we can provide, especially when they write things like “skool” and “gurl.”

Four years in an education program doesn’t make you better qualified to teach my child. That has been made abundantly clear to me through my own public school career (12 years), through my time in the English Ed. program (changed majors after my first round of student teaching, a story for another day), and through my time as the parent of a public schooled child. This woman’s problem isn’t that she thinks she can do a better job than a public school teacher, because with enough effort, self-education, and the right curricula, she might. The problem isn’t that she doesn’t spell well or use grammar, because if she’s devoted to continued her education along with her daughters’, that can improve. The problem is that she wants to put in minimal effort, yet expects maximum output.

Which, come to think of it, was one of the biggest problems we had with Captain Science’s last public school teacher.

• Math: Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra cities of Hampton, Race Track, and Tabor. Math Olympiad practice problems to prepare for next week’s tournament.
• Language Arts: Finished chapter 3 (“Unity”), wrote a paragraph on continental drift, and started chapter 4 (“Formality”) in Essay Voyage. Completed chapter VI in Caesar’s English II. Read through section 38 in Beowulf.
• History: Read chapters on the Church during the middle ages, on the Byzantine Empire, and on the Crusades.
• Science: Took PLATO Earth Science mastery test on water cycle (96%). Watched lesson and completed application and worksheet packet on oceans.
• Computer Programming: Did chapter 9 in KidCoder (“Working with Strings”) and did the programming activity.

Tank did pretty much jack this week. He wasn’t feeling great and I wasn’t feeling great and the weather wasn’t great so…excuses, excuses, right?

Babypie be’d cute:

If that wasn’t enough to get a Smrt Mama off to a slow start, my “smart” clock decided of its own accord that this morning was the right time to “fall back” for Daylight Savings Time. Yes, I know that the Brits are doing it, but our lovely government decided to extend it for the US, and YOU, stupid clock, do reside in the United States.

So here we are, starting the school day an hour late, because I didn’t think to look at another clock to confirm the time and my stupidly tired eyes didn’t notice the computer clock. Is this the perfect start to a new month, a new school week, and a new round of NaBloPoMo or what?

As Halloween fell on a weekend last year, our first year homeschooling, I haven’t ever had to deal with the Halloween Hangover before (my own, not just theirs). I was hoping that after last week’s drag-ass pace, that we’d be leaping forward into a great new energetic week. Alas, Monday is starting in an almost clichéd fashion. I’d kind of like to shoot the whole day down.

Are you and your kids nursing a Halloween Hangover? How do you cope on a homeschooling Monday after a Sunday Halloween?

I suppose that after so many great post-Disney weeks, we were due a bad Monday, especially since my weekend was swamped with the BOLD Red Tent event that Patchfire and I (along our three dear friends, Mel, Mandi, and Sarah) ran on Sunday. The boys stayed over at Nana’s house and she didn’t bring them home until 11, with my blessings, I might add.

I coaxed Captain Science through one chapter of math, which involved two hours on one problem, partially because he seems to have decided he just can’t master the distributive property. Once I started asking him questions, he was all, “Ooooooh, I didn’t realize you meant to do that!” *headdesk* Whatever, kid. Just finish your math.

After that, I put on The Black Stallion and called it our “comparative media” class. We paused the movie multiple times to discuss what was happening, how it compared to the book, etc. Captain Science said, “I like seeing the look in the movie compared to the look in my imagination.” He’s going to write an essay about it tomorrow.

Because I’m a MOM (mean ol’ mom) and because I think he can handle it, I gave him (one of my many copies of) Beowulf to read. Not a young reader version or a simplified version. Just my unabridged modern English translated text from college. Why? Because I can and because I think he can handle it. Plus, how do I pass up the version that begins with “Lo!”

Tank’s day consisted of computer games, tormenting the dog, and falling off the kitchen counter while sneaking candy. I’m a winner of a mom right there. He did, however, finally tell a joke that made sense and that he actually got: Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other SLIDE.

Babypie asked me for a “bite of water.” Ok, then!

I always prided myself on not being one of those parents.

I wasn’t one of those parents throughout Captain Science’s rocky pre-homeschooling educational career. When educators brought problems (or “problems”) to my attention, I didn’t immediately jump to the assumption that my child had done nothing wrong. In fact, I tended to err on the side of it probably being something he was doing that wasn’t quite right or, at least, not quite what they were looking for. When we had that horrible last year in public school, the third grade year of misery, I thought that perhaps, just perhaps, there might be a little something wrong with Captain Science. After all, if both his teacher and the gifted teacher thought something wasn’t right, it had to be him, right?

I was determined to not be one of those parents, brushing off concerns about possible developmental or behavioral problems simply because it was something I didn’t want to hear. Even though my gut told me that there was nothing “wrong” with Captain Science (even if he were different, different =/= “wrong”), I tried to listen with my brain instead. As a result, I not only jumped through hoops, but I made my child jump through hoops. He was assessed by a speech therapist. We asked my PT sister-in-law (who specializes in children with developmental/neurological disorders) take a look at him. We had my SLP brother-in-law and my PhD in early childhood education mother-in-law quietly assess him. We took him to a counselor to ascertain if he was “on the spectrum” as his teacher implied (“He reminds me so much of a boy I had in here last year who had Asperger’s.” “Having a label isn’t a bad thing! Everyone had a label these days!”) or if he had some deep-seated emotional problem that was causing his school problems.

After we’d jumped through the hoops, we discovered that the answer was that Captain Science was a quirky, incredibly bright boy with one glaringly big problem: the very school system that had insisted we had to jump through hoops to begin with.

At about that point, it hit me: maybe, just maybe, being one of those parents didn’t necessarily mean being blind to my child’s faults. Maybe it meant being my child’s advocate and supporter first, speaking up for him first, taking his side and believing his rightness first, instead of assuming that the adults were right and my child was probably wrong. Instead of presuming him guilty and allowing his accusers or detractors determine the means through which he would be cleared or condemned, perhaps I needed to presume him innocent until they could come up with some compelling evidence as to why I should believe he was anything otherwise.

Last night, I had a golden opportunity to be one of those parents when Captain Science’s soccer coach’s mother called to complain about his behavior at soccer practice (Captain Science is apparently one of “three or four” miscreants on the team). Instead of immediately becoming angry at Captain Science and assuming he had, indeed, cut up, I asked for some concrete examples. The coach’s mother could give me none, but said her son (the teenage coach) would. The coach had a difficult time articulating any specific examples, or articulating much of anything at all, other than one claim that Captain S had told another coach “you can’t make me” — something the coach I spoke to didn’t experience first hand, but only heard about after the fact. The only direct complaint the coach could give me was prompted by his mother, whom I could hear carrying on in the background: Captain Science had taken off his shirt during practice and hadn’t immediately put it back on when asked. This apparently greatly distressed both the coach and his mother, but is hardly an infraction I feel necessitated calling home.

I decided to be one of those parents. I know Captain Science pretty well. If he were being consistently criticized, fussed at, told he was doing something wrong, he would be complaining about how much he dislikes soccer when I got him at the end of practice. Instead, he’s bouncing off the field each day, full of joy, telling me how much he loves it. That doesn’t tell me my child is misbehaving and being corrected, so either he’s not the cut up he’s being accused of being or his coach lacks the authority to command respect and discipline the lack thereof. Neither of those makes me feel I need to “handle [this situation] at home,” as the coach’s mommy thought I should. In fact, that female coach Captain S had supposedly sassed? He brought up, unprompted, the brand new coach he’d had that day and how tough she was. He said she threatened to make them run laps, do pushups, etc. if they didn’t follow her instructions, and, Captain Science added, “I believed her!”

So, being one of those parents and assuming my child was NOT in the wrong lead me to investigate this further, without getting upset at him or about the situation, and discover that the source of the coach’s (and his mommy’s) dismay was probably the shirtlessness (their hangup, not mine), not the sass. Sure, I’ll keep an eye on him at the remaining practice and a half to make sure he’s not being rude to his coaches, but I’m not disciplining him for something I don’t remotely believe he did. I don’t doubt that the coach may feel disrespected, but after speaking to the kid, I think that any issues of respect problem lies in him and not in his players.

Yes, I know that this isn’t exactly the same as thinking my kid can’t ever do any wrong. It’s certainly more of a middle ground. It did, however, require a little bit of a paradigm shift away from thinking adults are right, children are wrong. More importantly, it involved a shift to thinking in favor of my child. Nothing wrong with a default of “I know my kid and he’s not a bad kid.” Nothing wrong with that at all.

If that means I might be one of those parents, even just a little bit, I’m ok with that.

Not everything is so inherently rewarding, however.

That overheating-related puking Tank experienced at Disney World? Yeah…might not have been solely overheating, as evidenced by the last 36 hours of illness that Babypie and Officer Daddyman have been experiencing. Could be two different puking viruses, as the incubation period seems awfully long and Babypie has been running a fever, whereas Tank (my fever-runner) did not, but it might be the same.

What I really wanted to do was call off homeschooling for another two days, since I’ve been holding and nursing a sickly baby, cleaning up said sickly baby, or washing clothes, sheets, and towels generated by that same sickly baby. I do not want to helpfully sit down with Captain Science and talk about Essay Town or correct his math or keep tabs on his time management. Because I’m made of awesome (well, because we took the previous week off for Disney World), we’ve been doing school work anyway. I’m not checking over his work with my usual vim, vigor, and haste, but we’re slowly plodding through it. Luckily, Tank has been more than happy to help me indulge Babypie in some Dinosaur Train after she threw up on her own feet and my clothes a second time.

You know what I want a medal for? THAT: Homeschooling with baby puke on my pants.

How come nobody ever says, “You don’t get a medal for homeschooling with baby puke on your pants?” when we homeschooling moms manage it anyway? Because THAT is actually quite hard and unrewarding, and getting a prize at the end would be really motivating.

I should also note that I started this post at 4pm, but Babypie puked on my feet, so it is only just now being posted.