It’s been a hell of a summer. Sprained ankles and weddings in the US Virgin Islands and cracked teeth (well, only one a piece of the first two, and two of the third one — one for me and one for Patchfire). We’ve been busy.

Today we start our ‘11-’12 school year. I can’t even wrap my head around how weird that is. I mean, I graduated from high school in 1997 and now my older son is starting 6th grade and my younger son is starting Kindergarten. How did I get old so fast?

I think our schedule this year is going to be pretty decent. Captain Science sat down with it and wrote out some ways he could keep himself on track, as well as (on his own) some things he thought made it a good schedule. High point point is apparently well-timed snack and lunch placement. He wants to set a timer for himself so he’ll have a bell to signal class change.

We’re moving our schedule up an hour this year, starting at 8 instead of 9. We all need to start getting up and at ‘em a little earlier anyway, so this will force my hand. I need to start going to bed earlier and waking up earlier to make the most of my day. Or something. Hell, I don’t know.

Tank is ready to go w/ school work. He won’t start most of his stuff until next week, because Daddyman is teaching the game camp, but he can’t wait to get started.

Pissed off today because I will no longer be teaching at the local homeschool co-op. The woman who runs it decided to wait until today to inform me that there will no longer be internet access, and did I need that for my classes? You know, my classes on blogging and online safety? Could I just use “snapshots” of the internet? Could I provide my own internet? Um, no. She’s had my course descriptions since the spring and only just bothered to talk about this with me, for classes starting in two weeks? Thanks, but no thanks, lady. We out.

This week is a light week. Today was orientation and the start of 10am piano lessons (a vast improvement over the 2pm ones, btw) and game camp homework and reading. The next three days are game design camp. Friday is an overview of the curricula for the year, then academic schtuffs start on Monday.

As an aside, Babypie is no longer Babypie. She is now The Honeybadger, because you know what? Honeybadger don’t care. Honeybadger don’t give a shit. She takes what she wants.

I’m so tired. Can’t I just go back to bed and claim I’m unschooling?

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.

Both days ran very late. In fact, the first day ran so late (almost an hour) that the director rescheduled the next day’s testing to account for an extra hour and a half…and they still ran another 45 minutes late over that! I’m pretty sure they took long breaks between every 15 minute test section.

Captain Science felt like he aced the math and the language arts, but he was a little concerned about the social studies, since he hasn’t actually had any of the stuff they covered. Oops! Told him it didn’t matter; all I want is to make sure he’s on track in math/LA and to satisfy the state’s requirements for standardized testing. None of this is the part I’d call “interesting,” however.

No, the interesting part was when, the day after testing, I picked Captain Science’s backpack up from the floor where he’d tossed it…and his test booklet and Scantron fell out. *headdesk*

That was an “oh, shit!” moment, because I was pretty sure that taking the test off site invalidated the test, meaning we’d wasted two days and $60-ish dollars on a test that would never get scored. The front of the book declared it to be property of whoever it is that distributes and scores the tests, so I emailed the test proctor and let her know we had her booklet and ask if I could drop it off. I became ever so happy to be a homeschooler when she let me know that, since the tests are only for our benefit (we have to DO them, but the state doesn’t get the scores), she’d just let me bring her the booklet and the Scantron and no one would need to be the wiser.

I zipped the whole kit n’ kaboodle up into a gallon-sized Ziplock bag, because for some reason, that made me feel like it was some how not being compromised by being away from the testing facility, and brought it to the proctor the next day. Results are already back and she’s mailing them to me.

The quirkiness of homeschoolers is how the test book came home to begin with — space cadet son + apparently equally space cadet proctors — but the quirkiness of homeschoolers also allowed us to turn the results in anyway. I’ll call it a win.

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.

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.

Also, pitchforks.

They offer quite a few options for how to handle it: Enroll your kids in public school, ignore the law and homeschool “off grid,” fight the system, move. Of course, Patchfire and I had to discuss this right away and in some semblance of depth. What would we do?

It would be a tricky predicament for me — with Officer Daddyman being a police officer, I usually make a point of not doing anything downright illegal. However, I’m also not at all willing to enroll my kids in the public school system around here. Not now; possibly not ever. Captain Science is too far ahead in some areas (language arts, math) and at weird points in others (like history — we haven’t done GA history, we haven’t gotten past Elizabethan era yet). I also don’t have the money to put the kids in private school, or at least not a quality private school (even then, I’m not sure I’d want to).

My first thought would be to find some online school to “enroll” the kids in. Anything that will pass the basic requirements of “school” but let me continue to homeschool as we see fit. Patchfire said that getting accreditation through GAC isn’t even all that hard, so we’d likely pursue that. Honestly, such a law wouldn’t last long in Georgia, so in reality, we’d panic for all of two weeks and then it would be a non-issue when (as Patchfire say) the first suit gets brought against the state.

Would I be willing to buck the law to homeschool my kids, though? At this point, yes. We’re off the grid in other areas and I’m willing to defy convention and even the law for the benefit of my children.

How about you?

I give you, for example, some things that suck [with some non-sucking things to cancel out a little of the badness]:

• The Tennessee Senate: Sucks. [This church in Kentucky does not suck]

[Note: Delaware also does not suck]

• Texas and Oklahoma: Both Suck. [Planned Parenthood does not suck, however, so consider donating to them or to your local non-CPC women's clinic -- I'm a big fan of the Feminist Women's Health Center, so you oughta donate to them, too]
• Crazy wives/mothers of cop-killing “sovereign citizens”: Suck. [No, there's nothing to cancel out this amount of suck.]
• The “Ladies Against Feminism”: Suck. [However, No Longer Quivering doesn't suck.]
• LZ Granderson: Sucks. [And if you need to know why, read this and this -- Shakespeare's Sister and Pigtail Pals don't suck.]

I’ll now go back to my regularly scheduled reading of BBC articles about the Assize of Nuisance and conditions of privies in medieval London, ’cause that shit stinks a little less than a lot of the above.

We will win.

We “heathens” and “heretics” and “sinners” will win.
We will win because we have less shame about our bodies.
We will win because we aren’t afraid to accept new ideas.
We will win because we can distinguish between evidence-based science and something written by men, translated by men, voted on for inclusion by men, preached by men, and enforced by men.
We will win because we don’t think someone or something made us inherently wrong or bad.
We will win because we will not teach our children to hate who they are.
We will win because we will not let our children tell other children to hate who they are.
We will win because we will accept your children into our families with love and tolerance when you have driven them away with shame and hellfire.
We will win because we won’t accept victims being blamed for the crimes against them,
Because we don’t equate “purity” with character,
Because we don’t equate individuality with sin,
Because we don’t equate intelligence with heresy,
Because we don’t equate pettiness with godliness.
Because we don’t equate shaming with modesty.

One day those hateful seeds you sow
In your churches,
In your communities,
In your children,
Will grow into ugly plants,
And when that is all you will have to reap,
You’re going to have a lean, lean winter.

Enjoy your harvest. You’ve earned it.

Love,

The Heretic The Heathen The Sinner Smrt Mama

On the other hand, the gender [stereo]typing set strongly encourages you to buy these and these, because it would be awful if your baby girls were mistaken as boys.

So, to summarize:

Playful bonding time with mom and son: BAD!

Dressing your infant daughter like a can-can dancer: GOOD!

UPDATE: Reader Sandhya would like to share this link so we can all learn how long-standing is the history of boys wearing blue and girls wearing pink (hint: it’s not really all that long-standing).