Some people felt like it was merely an expression of relief to return to a familiar routine. I’m sure that’s part of it, and is perhaps the actual intent behind some parents’ jubilation over the return to school, though that might be somewhat belied by the sheer exuberance about the children being gone for the day.

Some people felt it was expressive of sometimes we all (even homeschoolers) feel, which is “I’d like ONE FRIGGIN QUIET MINUTE TO MYSELF NOW PLEASE THANK YOU!” Definitely a sentiment with which I can empathize, as I dearly enjoy a brief break from the constant demands of parenting, though I don’t think I’m in any way entitled to a 7-8 hour break, 5 days a week.

Some people felt like it was indicative of an unhealthy mentality about what our “real lives” are or should be and how we must send children away in order to have those “real lives.” I think this is the crux of it and this is far from the only area where this mentality manifests. I also don’t think this is something people are making up in their own heads; there’s serious social pressure to divorce our “real” identities from parenting and to celebrate opportunities to not be beholden to our children’s needs.

When a woman gets pregnant, she’s bombarded with social messages that tell her she is supposed to “want her body back,” and the pressure begins to keep pregnancy as short as possible. When she breastfeeds, she’s not only told she’s supposed to “want her body back,” but to “want her life back,” something that can only be done by weaning the baby, of course, since breastfeeding is clearly not a part of life and “life” seems to be comprised of as many tactics as possible to physically distance yourself from your offspring. Case in point, when her child becomes school age, the woman is supposed to rejoice in sending the child away (to “real” school, of course), so she can finally “have her life back” again.

“Life,” by the way, doesn’t mean the responsible thing you’re living, with a spouse/partner, children, and a job. “Life” actually means that thing you were doing BEFORE kids, BEFORE responsibility, when everything was fun, fun, fun and you were only responsible for yourself. There’s this emphasis on the false notion of “adult life,” which seems to actually be code for “second youth,” a period of late teen/early 20s-like self-indulgence, partying, and forgetting (temporarily, at least) that one even has children. Most of the people I encounter who are longing for this “adult life” aren’t talking about added responsibility or maturity, but time without children in order to act like children. This is adulthood? This is “real” life?

This isn’t a mentality found solely in public school parents. If anything, I think it’s a generational problem. Gen X grew up, with all their extra self esteems and misplaced sense of entitlement (seriously, I’ve read articles written by Gen Xers saying Baby Boomers should retire, because they’re selfishly keeping all the good jobs), and they’ve had a hard time adjusting to the fact that they are no longer the center of the universe or life of the party. I feel perfectly comfortable saying this, since I’m at the tail end of the Gen X generation, and I have seen it in so many of my peers over the years. I think my generation is getting far worse with age, actually, because that self-involvement that was charming in a teen and tolerable in a 20-something has become very tired in a 30-something. Gen X can’t pull its head out of its collective asses long enough to realize that this message of “real” life that they’re buying into so completely isn’t real at all. It’s fabricated by people who are selling something, be it baby formula or school supplies or a mentality about your “real” life.

Why are they so happy their kids are going back to school? They’re told they’re supposed to be.

And they bought it.

These are a few of the traits I think are part and parcel of good writing. A strong writer should:

1. Use and understand symbolism. Use and understand connotation (ie. subtext), which is a subtle form of symbolism.
2. Create and implement figurative language maturely and avoid trite or cliched figures of speech. Don’t be afraid to play with language.
3. Display an understanding of pacing. Avoiding a sense of “and then…” is one mark of a strong writer. Good pacing makes a simple story seem profound. Bad pacing makes a profound story into a movie of the week.
4. Write with a strong narrative voice, even in non-fiction. Narrative voice is one reason why some biographies are so easy to read and others are a chore. If you don’t have a sense of your own voice, how is your reader meant to?
5. Eschew obfuscation. Writing so nobody can understand what the hell you’re talking about doesn’t make you look smart; it makes you look pretentious. If you have a point, make it. If you have a thesis, show it. Circumlocution and superfluousness have their place, but humping your point/thesis is not it.
6. Avoid retelling  the same story unless you can write it better than the original. You can swap out whatever other items you like for hair combs and pocket watch chains, but we all know you’re just rewriting “The Gift of the Magi.” And yes, we’ve also all read that essay on feminist themes in “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” so you’d better find something awfully revelatory to add to that particular line of thought before you invest several hours of your time in it.
7. Ensure that any item or creature that interacts w/ your main characters should be a tool that furthers the plot line, a symbol (see #1) that sheds light in the inner mechanisms of the character, or both. If you aren’t giving us Chekov’s gun or a satisfying red herring, don’t give it to us. Don’t give the readers details they don’t need simply for the sake of including more details.
8. Craft quality sentences, because if you can’t write a good sentence, you can’t write a good paragraph or essay. The devil is in the details.
9. View learning to write as a ongoing process, not a terminal goal post. You never really “learn to write.” It’s not a finite skill set. You can always improve your voice, your style, your finesse.
10. Have the ability to accept and implement edits from an editor (or professor or word-wise friend). All manner of grammatical errors can be overlooked in the arena of professional writing if you have the ability to work well with an editor.

Since I don’t view academic writing as the termination of writing instruction, my goals for teaching writing to my children are much more in line with developing the above traits than in developing fluency in specific formats. MLA, Chicago, and AP style all have their places, but they aren’t the sum of writing. If a writer has good prose, s/he can always apply a format to it. It’s easier to teach a good writer to work within a set of formatting rules than it is to teach someone who knows the formatting rules to write well.

What traits do you think are requisite in a good writer? How do those traits related to your goals in teaching writing?

*Stay on my good side and share your writing goals w/ Patchfire, too, as she started this whole conversation.

ETA: Also consider reading Kurt Vonnegut’s “How to Write with Style”.

Yes, I think they do. I watched Captain Science’s ability to think outside the box be slowly crushed during the course of his 3rd grade year, until he was afraid to think creatively (at least within the context of education) out of concern of chastisement by a disapproving authority figure. I saw the traits that made him unique treated as character flaws or manifestations of a disorder. I even went along with it at first, worried that I had simply been misinterpreting aberrant behavior as creativity.

Our story isn’t that unusual. It should be unusual. It should be completely off the wall, but it isn’t.

A friend recently shared some examples of class rules sent home by her daughter’s third grade teacher. The packet contained fifty rules that the children must follow. Not simple, two or three word rules, either, but fifty rules that meticulously spell out the exact behavior students were to exhibit under nearly every imaginable circumstance. Some examples:

Rule #3 of 50 — If someone in the class wins a game or does something well, we will congratulate that person. Claps should be at least three seconds in length with the full part of both hands meeting in a manner that will give the appropriate clap volume.

Rule #17 of 50 — We should be consistently be able to turn from one book to another, complete with all homework and necessary materials, as quickly as possible. The opportune amount of time to spend in transition should be less than ten seconds, and we will work toward a goal of seven seconds.

Rule #23 of 50 — Quickly learn the names of other teachers in the school and greet them by saying things like, “Good morning, Mrs. Graham,” or “Good afternoon, Ms. Ortiz. That is a very pretty dress.” Note: If you are in line with the rest of the class, you are not allowed to speak to the teachers at that time because the no talking rule is in effect.

Imagine your eight-year-old children receiving a list of fifty such rules. Do you see a lot of room for expressions of individuality within those rules? Would your child come out of that classroom more creative or less? Is this classroom, and the others like it, helping mold a generation of independent and abstract thinkers?

Sir Ken Robinson thinks public schools are killing, rather than nurturing, creativity, and speaks eloquently about it:

As you can see, she was quite a pretty thing, very elegant and well turned-out:

Ada Lovelace also wrote the world’s first computer program, a series of calculations for a then-hypothetical machine of Charles Babbage’s imagination, the “Analytical Engine.” Her program was never run on this machine and she died in her mid-thirties of uterine cancer, but her brilliant mathematical mind (and the contributions of women to science and mathematics) is celebrated annually on March 24th on Ada Lovelace Day. Her imagine also apparently appears on the Microsoft product authenticity hologram stickers. Being pretty didn’t keep her from doing math. Neither did being bound in corsets and yards of fabric.

Since you all know I don’t think highly of perpetuating that ridiculous cultural myth that girls are (or should be) bad at math, I’d like to invite you to check out this beautiful Heroine: Ada Lovelace tee from ThinkGeek (a company that thinks smart girls rock). Due to the high number of sales of this shirt in its first month available, ThinkGeek is contributing to The Girl Effect, an organization to give girls a chance to pursue the educations they desperately need. Obviously, ThinkGeek and I aren’t the only ones who think Mathy Girls ought to be celebrated.

Don’t make your daughters’ minds into a joke. Don’t slap your daughters with a degrading stereotype and try to pretend it’s funny or “ironic.” Celebrate your mathy girl, your budding scientist, your future Ada Lovelace. Let her know that beauty and brains aren’t mutually exclusive, and that a brilliant mind is beautiful.

Spam comments will not be approved. I was more than willing to approve this woman’s comment (and did, in fact) for response, but I won’t tolerate spam. I regularly approve dissenting opinions, but I’m not willing to be harassed. Flooding my blog with comments will accomplish nothing other than a quick click on the “spam” button. I’m also not so naive as to believe that a large volume of random people would suddenly discover a 7 month old post and all leap to defense of this woman, so spare me the “I enjoy your blog…” nonsense. I know who my readers are.

Toughen up or get out of the business, honey, but you’re wasting your time spamming me. I only have conversations with grown-ups here.

ETA: Received another comment from someone saying that the “too pretty for math” lady didn’t ask them to spam; they’re just doing it out of the kindness of their heart. If that’s the case, ladies, you’re doing your friend a disservice. Bad reviews are part of business. Perhaps this will be a lesson about thinking about the greater implications of your products, because reinforcing sexist and negative stereotypes is usually not taken as “fun.”

However, I have received my favorite comment so far! It might even be my favorite comment of all time: “I am not one to throw stones.. but the name of the blog has grammer and spellying typos ALL OVER IT.. Smrt lernins? seriously?…”

I hate when I have those “grammer” and “spellying” typos, don’t you? *snort* Please, please tell me these mistakes were made intentionally!

Are you guilty of the “relentless interrogative?” Are your children?

I know that I am going to make a more concerted effort to have my declarative sentences actually declare and to speak with certainty and confidence in my opinions. I don’t want to be a part of a downward slide into inarticulation. Speak with authority so that your children can learn to speak with authority. Let’s model conviction for the next generation.

He has it on good authority that peepee oil might be covering Mexico and killing people, the fish, dolphins, and sharks. He seems to be the most concerned about the sharks.

He is worried that the peepee oil means we won’t be able to go to the beach again. He’s probably right.

He wants to know if the peepee oil will get into Lake Acworth. I assured him it wasn’t very likely to.

He would like to know how we plan to clean up the peepee oil and how long it will take. I don’t have any answers for him.

Tank is very sad about the peepee oil.

I haven’t shown my children any pictures of the beaches of my childhood, like Gulf Shores, covered with tar balls and pools of BP’s oil. I haven’t shown them the pelicans, the state bird of my birth state, foundering with oil-covered wings. I haven’t shown them dead dolphins being fished out of the Gulf. I have tried to explain that many people will lose their jobs, that many animals will die, and that the Gulf coast may not ever be the same — certainly not in my lifetime, probably not in theirs, and possibly not even in their children’s.

They’re children. To them, time means nothing. They are confident that someone smart will find a way to stop the oil and clean up the mess. With the boundless faith that well-cared-for children have in adults, they believe that they will grow up in a world that is safe, clean, and full of dolphins. That’s what grownups are here for, right?

Right?

*BP

Instead of additional (or maintained) property tax, our county’s school district budget cuts will include, among other things, increasing classroom size, decreasing the instructional supply allotment, “restructuring” the alternative education program, and cutting the number of teachers (by over 600) and guidance counselors/graduation coaches (by 55).

The email had this to say about classroom size:

Increasing class sizes creates the greatest budget cost-savings – as class sizes increase the district needs fewer teachers. Earlier this month, the Georgia Department of Education waived all restrictions on class size to help school districts across the state contend with the economic crisis. In [our county], where class sizes already were well below the state maximum at every grade level, schools can expect to see classes increase on average by approximately three students. That number is averaged, so some classes may be higher and others lower.

Yup. Our state no longer has ANY class size restrictions. While our county’s schools were under the maximum classroom size, many schools in less economically affluent counties are already at the maximum. Can you imagine what this will do to classroom size in rural schools? Is schools that have mostly low income and/or renting (non property tax paying) families? Schools with high seasonal migrant worker populations (such as in Vidalia onion-growing country)? How large will classrooms become in this “economic crisis?”

As for reducing instructional supply allotment, well, that means the teachers are either going to have to greatly increase the amount of money they spend on classroom supplies (everything from printing paper to crayons to maps and other supplemental materials to Kleenex and hand sanitizer) OR that will be passed along to the parents, whose list of required supplies for each new school year gets longer and longer. The last year Captain Science was in public school, we provided two packs of computer paper, crayons, glue sticks, scissors, tape, folders, tissues, hand sanitizer, soap, and quite a few other sundry items I don’t recall right off the top of my head. These items were all for general, not personal use.

Guidance counselors are often portrayed as being superfluous or even goofy (even if they’re adorably goofy, like Emma on Glee), but for some students, the help of a guidance counselor in high school is how they get into a college or get the scholarship to pay for a college. Some students don’t have access to therapists/counselors outside of school, due to parental unwillingness, lack of insurance, or other reasons. Remove guidance counselors from schools and students may lose that one small place where they can seek help.

Sure, these cuts might make fiscal sense in the short term, but what are the long term ramifications? How well will students learn in classrooms of 25, 30, 35+ students? Who will help these students with college applications or crises? What will classrooms be like when teachers have had their classroom budgets stripped to nothing?

While I think our county has a good public education system (in comparison to other public education), I am increasingly grateful that we removed our children from it. Thank goodness for the option to homeschool in these tough economic times!

* * *

Who am I?

Who am I, to tell you what you can and can’t teach your child?

Who am I, to tell you that you must teach things that I believe in or be forbidden to teach?

Who am I, to tell you that because I am a secular homeschooler, that you must educate your children secularly or be forbidden to teach?

Who am I, to tell you that because I am a classical homeschooler, that you must educate your children classically or be forbidden to teach?

Who am I, to tell you not to impart your religious, moral, ethical, ideological, etc. beliefs to your child?

Who am I, to tell you to lie to your child and tell them that what you believe to be true isn’t true (whether or not I think it’s true)?

Who am I, to tell you that you must teach all values and all beliefs to be equal, whether you believe them to be or not?

Who am I, to tell you that what you teach must be regulated carefully, because you might teach the “wrong” thing?

Who am I, to tell you that what you teach must be regulated carefully, because someone else might teach the “wrong” thing?

Who am I, to legislate for everyone what is the “wrong” and what is the “right” thing?

Who am I, to legislate morality?

Who am I, to legislate belief?

Who am I?

Here’s a hint, I’m not Jean Valjean.

On the whole, I found her opinions on homeschooling to be quite positive, but I take issue with some of the concerns she mentions in her post:

At the same time, there are things that concern me about home education:

• I worry that parents who homeschool for ideological reasons may be shielding their children from the realities of the world (other belief systems, other cultures) and their selves (sexuality, gender issues, personal expression), which I believe is dangerous for the individual and for society.
• I worry that a small minority of parents who homeschool for ideological reasons may be doing so specifically to pass on discriminatory and hateful viewpoints to their children.
• I worry that parents who take their children out of school out of frustration with the school system (generally or for their specific child) may feel forced into home educating their children when really the school system should be changing and adapting to address those concerns.
• I worry that children who grow up under the guidance of the most gentle, patient, loving and inspiring parents without being exposed to teachers who are strict, ineffective, jerks, play favourites, or use coercive methods may not learn how to deal with those types of people before entering the workforce and may be at a disadvantage (although to be fair, a lot of today’s schooled youth aren’t dealing with them themselves anyway – they are getting mommy and daddy to do it for them).

You all know how I feel about the “school as a place to learn to toughen up for the ‘real world’” stance, so I’ll just link to my comment I left on the PhD in Parenting blog and leave it at that.

What about her other concerns, like the idea that parents who homeschool may be doing so to instill hateful or dangerous ideologies in their children? How harmful is “immersing [our] children in [our] beliefs and shielding them from others?” Are parents really more or less likely to attempt to instill their ideologies in their children based on where their child schools? Are homeschooled children more likely to be racist, bigoted, etc. than their institutionally-schooled counterparts? To what extent should the State or the collective get to choose the ideologies to which your child should be exposed?

And what about her assertion that “in most cases [parents choose to homeschool because] there are perfectly reasonable and factual things taught as part of the school curriculum that the parents do not want their children to learn (evolution, birth control, homosexuality, other religious beliefs)?” Was this a motivating factor for you? For the homeschoolers you know? To what extent? Was it because the curricula covered topics you felt were inaccurate or inappropriate? Was it because the curricula were too religious or not religious enough?

And finally, what about her statement that she “believe[s] more strongly in the child’s right to an education than [she] do[es] in the parent’s right to raise their children any way they want?”  Is a child’s right to a specific set of academic knowledge greater than your rights as a parent to pass on your morality, ethics, culture, or ideology? If you’re an unschooler or (I am warming to this term) “life learner,” do you think the child’s right to an education is more or less important than his freedom to make his own decisions, even if those choices are towards the less academic?

I know my answers to these questions. I’ve read some of the exceptionally thoughtful comments to her blog (like Kelly and Kim @ Beautiful Wreck’s). Now, I’d like to hear yours.