The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

Ceci n'est pas une homeschooler

Funny thing, this. It's 11:13 on a Monday morning. My kids are running around in their pajamas (actually, their t-shirts and boxers). They slept in partly because we stayed up late last night watching science experiments on YouTube and the first several episodes of the Teaching Company series "The Human Body: How We Fail, How We Heal." Fisher was enthralled with the explanation of cell biology and the inflammatory response. Rhys insisted on doing a Google search for sodium acetate so we could make our own hot ice. We also read a chapter of John Bellairs' The House With a Clock In Its Walls and a book about Mars; Rhys even favored us with a reading of Mr. Putter & Tabby Spin the Yarn. This was after the boys had spent the day constructing a menagerie of imaginary animals out of air-dry clay... building models on the Lego Creator site... playing a rousing family game of Carcassonne... and taking a two-hour trip to OMSI with Papa so Mama could get some of her so-important work done. (I wrote a CV. Heh heh. I have a CV.)

Yet, despite the boys' stubborn non-presence in school today and the notable lack of any sort of textbooks in & around our home, we are apparently not actually homeschooling. Nope. Not according to the authorities at Home Education Magazine, anyway--and they've been doing this a lot longer than we have, they should know.

How can this be? Check it out:

We homeschoolers know cyber charter schools are NOT homeschools. Their spread threatens to change the definition of homeschooling and do us in both with regulations all charter schools are under because they are public schools and with hoops cyber charter schools have to jump through to demonstrate that their students are really learning and are studying for the number of hours required by compulsory school attendance laws.

Yep. We are the tainted, the unwanted, the cyberschoolers. Not because we felt we "don't have enough money or confidence or education or whatever," as Helen Hegener suggests. But, rather, because EdChoices, the virtual school where our boys are enrolled, offered several benefits we were looking for:

• Flexibility. Our boys are each enrolled in a math class, and Fisher's taking Rosetta Stone German. I didn't see any need for them to take an online language arts, social studies or science class... so they're not.
• Understanding of homeschooling--no, really. Our facilitator-teacher-person, Kendra, wholeheartedly supports our decision to learn as a family; she's not a bit pushy, and the boys enjoy getting messages from her about their progress in math.
• Cooperation with Village Home. EdChoices has set up a partnership with Village Home (our home education resource center) whereby they actually pay for our membership and classes out of the public-school funds they receive for our boys. This has meant that for the winter term, we'll be able to take more classes than we did in fall term. Plus, with my unemployment, we wouldn't have been able to pay for any classes at all, meaning the boys would lose their social nexus as well as the great learning opportunities they experience at VH.
• A teeny, tiny tad of structure. Yes, I'm pretty much an unschooler to the core. All I have to do is stand back and take a look at what I've learned, what Jim has learned, what the boys have learned all on our own without anybody "making" us. But at the same time, I think an important set of life skills involves accountability, organization and learning to play by the rules when necessary. (This is why hard-core unschoolers will never consider me an unschooler, either. Heh.) I am not well equipped to set up and carry out an entire course of study, and I am glad to be able to tap into a resource that does so for me.

So since I'm not a homeschooler, I guess I have no right to tell real, true, honest-to-golly homeschoolers what they should think about the creeping plague of online charter schools. But if one of them did want to bend her ear my way, this is what I'd tell her:

When I look at what EdChoices is doing in partnership with Village Home (created by homeschoolers, for homeschoolers... and with a fairly strong unschooly bent), I see a great opportunity to build bridges between public and home education. I, along with many other home educators, would love to see a new model of public school emerge: one that's more like a library than a factory, one where individual choice and interests and needs are respected and honored. The children of Real True Homeschoolers are not the only ones who would benefit from individualized education--I think every child, in a better world, would have the same opportunity to learn, grow and discover that my kids currently enjoy.

And what of the argument that any alliance with public schools opens the door to "guvmint interference," that dreaded bugaboo of every homeschooling family? Personally, I'm not too freaked out about the annual test required by Oregon state law; I think yes, it's possible for there to be bad homeschoolers who shouldn't be keeping their kids home (the woman I knew from MOPS who taught her kids exclusively out of the Bible leaps to mind) and I don't think (though Real True Homeschoolers surely disagree with me) that parents have exclusive rights to control the contents of their kids' minds.

In a democratic society, we have the right to "petition the government for the redress of grievances"... surely that means that home educating families have the right, if not the responsibility, to get involved with politics as it applies to homeschool law. Don't like the current law? Rather than retreating to your cabin to mutter darkly down the barrel of your gun, try writing letters, attending meetings, making your voice heard, participating in public life. Show (don't tell... or scream at) the world that homeschooling is a viable choice practiced by an enormously diverse group of families.

Seriously, in our (non-)homeschooling journey, one thing I've been really surprised and saddened to discover is the extent to which many homeschoolers enjoy dividing the world up into "us" and "them." Whether it's radical unschoolers telling people the restrictions they place on their kids' video game playing are tantamount to child abuse, or Michael Smith of HSLDA talking up Patrick Henry College students' standardized test scores as proof that Homeschoolers Do It Better... it bothers me no end how attached people are to building their little boxes and shutting other people out.

But then, don't listen to me. I'm not really a homeschooler.

Tears of the Minotaur

Wouldn't that be a great, by which I mean awful, title for a fantasy novel? I think I'll write it, once I get done with the current (ha) one (ha ha). Which I did write almost 5000 words on yesterday, so shut up. (My new Cunning Plan: finish a book, sell it, make money from it, then be a stay-at-home mommy and spend some time doing genu-wine kid stuff, which sounds wonderfully tempting right now but would probably drive me crazy about three weeks into the actual endeavor).

It's been a rough few weeks here at Chez Newman, as I think I just typed in an e-mail to a recently-made-former colleague. Job loss, rain rain rain, Jim being asked not to come in yesterday because there weren't enough reservations to justify the presence of so many employees, a complete & total embargo on anyone ever calling me back about any job ever, and then as a capper I had to go watch 28 Days Later and Pan's Labyrinth in fairly rapid and entirely depressing succession. So now there are visions of Rage-infested Spanish Fascist soldiers dancing like so many blood-leaking sugarplums in my head. And I am sitting in a cafe working on a laptop computer with no functional battery and a keyboard that transmits signals about 4 seconds after I actually press the key, and there is an old deafish lady at the next table screaming "Memoir! MEMOIR!!" at her old deafish husband, which is a tiny shred of fabulousness in an otherwise grim outlook.

And now, an anecdote.

The place: Fisher & Rhys' bedroom, last night around 11 o'clock. (Bedtime, schmedtime.)
The situation: both boys are tucked into bed; Fisher is sobbing loudly, having just recently fallen down the stairs, barked his shin and gotten scolded for yelling "GET ME A F*CKING JACKHAMMER NOW!" at me. (Get it? Jackhammer... so he can destroy the offending stairs? Get it?)

Rhys (holding Fisher's baby doll out to Fisher): Look, Fisher, it's Dr. Fraaaanklin... coming to fix you up and make you all beeeeetter! (makes tickling motions with baby doll) Tickle, tickle, tickle!

Me: Rhys, I don't know if that's the wisest thing to do when you're sitting next to someone with that much clobbering power. (N.B.: "Clobbering power" is said in a sort of faux-monster truck announcer voice... think "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!!")

Fisher: (sobs degenerate into throaty howls, from which he will not be dissuaded, and so he continues to hide under the covers and cry while the rest of us "tell the day," i.e., share our favorite parts of the day with each other)

Me: (rubbing Fisher's back) Sweetie, are you sad because your leg really hurts?

Fisher: No, because you said a mean thing... you said I have pummeling power and I DON'T WANT PUMMELING POWER!

Me: (massive maternal guilt wave) Oh, Sweetie, I'm sorry... I know you've been trying really hard lately not to pummel anyone.

Fisher (face pushed into pillow): I have! I've been trying so hard!

So after some reassurances and my warm glow that Fisher is apparently disavowing all forms of violence... yeah, like half an hour later I was back in there making Fisher stop forcing Rhys' face into the mattress while Rhys squeaked in terror. Pummeling, no... smothering, yes, apparently. Sigh.

Also, what should my parents name this concrete-colored cat who appears to have adopted them?

In which waah waah waaaahh

My tooth hurts. It's been hurting on and off for a couple of months.

It's one of the molars in my upper right maxilla. Probably the one the dentist told me was going to need a root canal sooner or later--apparently there was a filling that was too big for the tooth and the enamel was going to crack around it one of these days. I think one of these days has arrived.

It's getting worse. I was just having to chew on the left side of my mouth. Then I stopped being able to drink ice water (which I pretty much gave up after we moved to Portland anyway). Then I started having to drink my coffee in some funky slantwise fashion in an effort to keep the heat away from the tooth. Then it started hurting all on its own whenever it felt so inclined, and now it's pretty hard to think about anything other than ow ow ow oww.

And I seem to have a low-grade fever today, so of course in my ever-rational mind that means that matters have progressed from just plain hurty to ZOMG septic abscess leading to Certain Death!!! and I have to ask myself if it would be better to die of a horrible bacterial infection or to plunge my family deeper into debt by actually going and getting this taken care of and I'm kinda inclined to choose (a).

But I do have cranberry extract tablets. They work pretty damn well on UTIs; why wouldn't they work on infected teeth? Worth a shot, anyway.

(A side note: I have had problems with my teeth since, well, like forever. And it never fails to piss me off, because I'm like one of three people I know who actually flosses. As in, daily. Or twice daily. There seems to be a wee smidge of cosmic unfairness in here somewhere.)

So if I'm not around much, or if I'm crankier than usual, now you know why. Dental disaster uninsured stupid rotten tooth phooey.

Not worth it/Worth it

Not worth it:

• the horrible pukey feeling I get whenever I see, hear or run across a mention of Sarah Palin. I think I've figured out why I have such a viscerally negative reaction to her--it has to do with the perfecter-than-thou mommies at MOPS who offer up chunks of godly advice like "if your three-year-old son isn't potty-trained yet, try sticking him in a cold shower whenever he messes his pants"--but I'm trying really freaking hard not to dwell on it.
• feeling helpless and paralyzed about anything career-, goal- or money-related. Can't someone just come tell me what to do? I promise I'll do it, or at least try.
• freaking out over the smudgy light switches which have been bothering the hell out of me for like four weeks now so you'd think I'd just grab a Magic Eraser and wipe them down already. God.
• the waves of self-loathing that wash over me whenever I look down at my big ol' muffin top jelly belly. Which I then try to push back into the generalized tide of dissatisfaction with the help of a nice big slab of cold leftover roast beef out of the refrigerator.

Worth it:

• hearing Fisher and Rhys cracking up over the dopey homemade Lego Star Wars videos on YouTube.
• snuggling up with the boys for our daily read-aloud of a chapter from the Landmark biography of Alexander the Great (how retro is that?).
• listening to Rhys read through another Little Bear story (this time, my favorite: "Little Bear Goes to the Moon") with growing confidence and a genuine giggle at the silly parts.
• having two boys (three if you count Jim) who genuinely appreciate my cooking and get all excited about corn dog casserole.
• going for a solo stroll through the neighborhood on a perfectly beautiful almost-fall day, earbuds screwed into my ears, Beck's "Peaches and Cream" cranking, crows and squirrels scolding as I pass under their tree-limb stakeouts.
• wriggling on my belly through the narrow spooky part of Ape Cave Lava Tube and emerging on the other side to a constellation of flashlights in my face.
• lifting weights and doing pushups 'til my arms get all trembly and I'm reminded how good it feels just to move.
• spending two and a half days in Vegas with two of my favorite co-workers learning awesome stuff about Photoshop on the company dime... and picking up a stellar Betsey Johnson coat in the process.
  
• getting Lightroom 2, Photoshop CS3 and Photomatix HDR tone-mapping software all working together in beautiful harmony.
• waking up half an hour before I have to be out of bed and spending that half hour with my head snuggled up on my sweetie's shoulder and, um, ahem.
• discovering that the boys have a previously-unsuspected love for the music of Kenny Rogers. (Shut up. Kenny Rogers rocks.)
• moments like this (rooty hair, smudgy-faced boy and all):

Yeah, pretty much totally worth it.

Blaaaaaaaagh.

That's pretty much it.

The mere sight of my to-do list, plus the mere thought of the things I have to do but haven't added to the list, plus the shrieking of my beloved spawn ("He stood on my money!" "He pinched me really hard!" "Waaah!"), plus the snarling of my justly-annoyed husband ("You sit down right there and don't you move!") plus the clatter of the jackhammer outside (WTF?)...

...yeah, pretty much blaaaaaaaaagh.

Thank goodness that I have the Butthole Surfers to get me through it all. ("What do you know about reality? I am reality! What do you know about death? I am death!")

And, y'know, the glass of wine that I'm planning on starting in on at precisely 12:01 PM. That's just 39 blessed minutes from now...

IOKIYAR

(That's "It's OK If You're A Republican," if you didn't already know.)

Damn. I have been wanting and wanting and wanting to write a nice snarky post on Sarah Palin. Originally to be titled "Sarah Freakin' Palin?!" But the bombshells won't stop dropping long enough for me to compose myself & my post. So I'll just do the best I can here, and exhibit the most restraint possible.

So Obama's campaign and the overlords of the liberal blogosphere have been pleading for people to stop pointing out the Palin family's personal idiosyncrasies and focus on Sarah Palin's grasp (or lack thereof, really) of the issues instead. But it just seems to me that if your political life has been dedicated to punishing women for having sex (even sex against their will), banning books that threaten to inform kids about sex and attending churches that go on and on about how dreadful and horrible all non-married non-hetero sex is (and about how those who oppose Bush are traitors and those who voted for Kerry won't be going to heaven)...

...maybe you should at least be able to keep your daughter from getting knocked up by a self-described "fuckin' redneck" whose passions include guns, fish and "not having any kids."*

That's abstinence-based education at work, folks. That's Sarah Palin's (and John McCain's) vision for the future of this great country. Shotgun weddings of underinformed teenagers... teenagers who will then go on to crank out more babies for Jesus.

So maybe this makes me an elitist. An evil, Cabernet-sipping, left-coast liberal elitist who can't see past people's crusty (ew) Alaskan exteriors to the hearts of gold that beat within them. Well, if not wanting decisions about my family's and my country's future to be made by someone who offers a $150 bounty for each wolf's foreleg a hunter turns in, someone who believes the earth is 6000 years old and wants creationism taught in schools, someone who thinks it's God's will to build new oil pipelines and slaughter Muslims makes me an elitist... well, then, I say bring on the Cabernet!

Next time, maybe, but probably not: Sarah Palin's record as a pork-chasing, vindictive petty tyrant. Woo hoo!

*Please note that I'm not blaming Palin's daughter's having had sex on Palin herself. Hell, high school kids have sex all the time, and more power to 'em. However, I do blame her anti-contraception, anti-information, anti-reality stance for her daughter's pregnancy. My older kid isn't even ten yet and he knows about where babies come from and about the existence of reliable contraceptives. Fercryinoutloud, people.

Are we having fun yet?

Doesn't look like it, does it?

In fact, it sort of looks like these folks (three of whom are apparently members of the Matching Douchebag Hat Society) are in line at the low-income medical clinic waiting to get their gonorrhea test results back. And they're watching the most recent patient doing the walk of shame back toward the parking lot, thinking to themselves, "This is sort of an embarrassing place to be, but at least I can get this whole mess cleared up with a brief course of antibiotics."

You'd never know they were actually at Holocene, a club in Portland that puts on pretty good shows a fair number of nights per week, watching Strangers Die Every Day, a string trio/rock band with a beautiful godspeed you! black emperor-ish vibe and an amazing stage presence, would you?

So listen. I love Portland. I love living here; I love the restaurants, the bridges, the live music every-freakin-where you go, the fascinating fashion combinations and so on. But this is a thing I've noticed since the first show we went to here, and it bugs the hell out of me every time:

If you are too cool to enjoy yourself at a show, you are too cool to be there at all. And so you should probably stay home.

Jim and I went to Someday Lounge on Saturday night to see a trifecta of bands: Bodhi, Eternal Tapestry (yes! it is the goofiest name ever for a band!) and Modey Lemon. All the bands were good; we went because we'd heard fine things about Bodhi, but everyone ended up putting on a pretty swell show. Eternal Tapestry was the biggest surprise of the night: their guitarist, who was a very unassuming-looking and rather nerdish fellow, ended up shredding in major Guitar Hero hip-thrusting axe-slamming guitar-strap-snapping style. And Modey Lemon (straight outta Pittsburgh!), all three of whose members looked remarkably like refugees from Stillwater (the band in Almost Famous, if you don't want to look it up) freakin rocked. They were amazing--heavy and solo-ey without being jammy or noodley (both of which traits are the kiss of death as far as I'm concerned... I don't want to feel like I've accidentally wandered into a Phish concert, for god's sake).

So there's all this fine music happening on stage in a fine venue (Someday Lounge is beautifully nicely laid out for a small club). And Jim and I are having a fine time... you know, a little head-bobbing, a little toe-tapping, nothing egregious. (Nobody loves the solo hippie dancer who seems to show up at every free show on the planet, twirling and waving her arms about like a sad little Deadhead kelp strand.)

And pretty much everybody else in the place is standing there, arms crossed, super-blase cranky expressions on their chin-pubed faces, as chock-full of enthusiasm as a box of All-Bran. Smiling is uncool, you know, as is clapping or, heaven forbid, shaking your booty a little bit.

I can't even imagine how disheartening it must be for a band to be putting their hearts into a show (especially those bands who have to schlep their own gear... gee whiz), rocking too hard for just one hand, and then to look down and see a bunch of po-faced knuckleheads standing there concentrating on maintaining the Facade of Eternal Hipness.

Seriously, people, if you can't just stay home and suffer your angst in private, can you at least get away from the front of the stage so those of us who are actually there to enjoy ourselves can get a better look?

Portland, get over yourselves! Have fun or get out!

The end of the Rainbow

Didn't we go through this last year? (Yes. Yes, we did.)

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, or the swifts returning to Chapman Elementary School... the arrival of the gi-freakin-gantic Rainbow Resource catalog each year heralds a change of season, a fresh opportunity to go completely overboard planning what we're going to do "next year," homeschooling-wise. (Isn't it odd how even homeschoolers get into the September-to-June academic year concept? In our case, I blame it on Village Home.)

Yesterday, the unlucky mailman stumbled up to our door with one thousand, three hundred seventy pages of pure homeschooling insanity. And I spent a while last night flipping through and seeing if there was anything I just had to add to our list of goodies for next year (right now, it mostly includes card games and art supplies, with the occasional smidge of math curriculum).

And in the overwhelmingly enormous "Bible" section that occupies 85 pages smack-dab in the middle of the catalog, I came upon this:

Institutes of Biblical Law

This is a heavy book, both in weight and in tone. Just shy of War and Peace in size, at 890 pages, author Rousas John Rushdoony* discusses the applicability of Old Testament biblical law to our world more than 3,000 years down the road from when the law was first given.

...Rushdoony covers dominion, theft, restitution and forgiveness.... He talks about big societal issues, like whether imprisonment is a biblical punishment, and whether state oversight of business practices is beneficial or harmful.

...[i]n discussing the fifth commandment, "Honor thy father and mother," we learn about various arguments by anti-family critics, claiming that the institution of the family did not come about by God's design, but from a patriarchal desire for personal power.

...This is a better book than I thought it would be. I expected a dry, academic disucssion of biblical law that only a theologian/attorney would love. Instead I found a meaty discussion of many current issues with profound implications. How we view biblical law does matter.

Exsqueeze me? Baking powder? "Big societal issues?" "Profound implications?" That might be a wee bit of an understatement.

This is the book, after all, in which Rushdoony wrote "[T]he heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state, and it has worked towards reducing society to anarchy... Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies." It's also where he stated that "[Biblical] law is humane and also unsentimental. It recognizes that some people are by nature slaves and will always be so."

Oh, and this little gem:

Segregation or separation is thus a basic principle of Biblical law with respect to religion and morality. Every attempt to destroy this principle is an effort to reduce society to its lowest common denominator. Toleration is the excuse under which this levelling is undertaken, but the concept of toleration conceals a radical intolerance. In the name of toleration, the believer is asked to associate on a common level of total acceptance with the atheist, the pervert, the criminal, and the adherents of other religions as though no differences existed.

So what does Rushdoony think should be done with "the atheist, the pervert, the criminal," as well as those who engage in what he considers to be idolatry or blasphemy (Catholics... Mormons... Orthodox)? Or non-virgin wives, adulterers or kids who talk back to their parents? Death by stoning, of course. What else would constitute a right and proper fulfillment of biblical law?

Rushdoony's followers in the Reconstructionist movement (including the entirely terrifying Chalcedon Foundation), advocate the replacement of the U.S. Constitution with the first five books of the Old Testament, with their uniquely bigoted, misogynistic and bloodthirsty spin. They believe democracy to be inherently flawed and evil. They believe that "the Christian state should enforce Biblical civil law; and... that the responsibility of Christians is to exercise dominion in the earth for God's glory."

In short, they subscribe to beliefs that I consider un-American at least, and treasonous at worst. And for a flag-waving, mom-and-apple-pie, hooray-for-Christian-liberty company like Rainbow Resource to enthusiastically recommend a book like this one forces me to reconsider where I'm sending my (very) few, (very) hard-earned homeschooling curriculum dollars. They've gotten over $500 of my cash in the last three years, and I had a $370 wish list for this year. But no. I'm walking away.

(Maybe the reviewer didn't read the whole thing? Maybe he should have?)

So I'm having to do a bit of scrambling, since Rainbow was really the only place that carried everything I wanted to order for next year. (Not to mention that it was the cheapest by far.) But, y'know, I don't shop at Wal-Mart either. Us morally relativistic secular humanist types have got to maintain our inferior non-biblically based principles somehow, yes?

On the bright side, though: I really really wanted to use "The Elements: Ingredients of the Universe" for a chemistry resource this year. And wouldn't you know it, I couldn't find it anywhere except at Rainbow Resource, until one of the good folks on the Secular Homeschooling Yahoo! group pointed me to the author's Web site where I can order it direct, scary Dominionist theology not involved in any way.

*yes, I am fully aware that a grammatical snafu of this magnitude should've been reason enough for me to chuck the whole catalog out the window and go on my merry way

Why we homeschool, iteration 3725

Because my children will never be asked to stand up and describe what they don't like about a person, then participate in a vote on whether or not that person should be allowed to remain in the classroom.

A teacher in St. Lucie, Florida, did just this in her kindergarten class. As a five-year-old boy, who is in the process of being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, was forced to stand at the front of the room, his classmates were each given a turn to say what they disliked about him. They described him with words including "disgusting" and "annoying," then voted 14-2 to make him leave the classroom; he spent the rest of the day banished to the nurse's office. The Florida state attorney's office says this treatment does not qualify as emotional abuse and is not pursuing criminal charges against the teacher. The district says it is "investigating" the incident (which teacher Wendy Portillo has admitted) but has not yet taken any action.

The boy has refused to return to school since then; and if I were his mother, I can't imagine why I would even try to make him go back.

Since our children are not (surprise!) completely socially isolated, we attend classes two days a week at Village Home. One of the most heartening things I've observed in our time there is the way that all kids--the loud ones, the quiet ones, the ones of varying cognitive and social ability, the ones who I am pretty sure have been or could be diagnosed as autistic--are treated as just part of the group. There are special friendships, sure; but I haven't seen poisonous cliques, I haven't seen shunning, I haven't seen my kids or anyone else's deliberately leave someone out because of personal differences.

And I know when I tell my boys about this little boy in Florida, they will be as horrified as anyone should be. As horrified as the students in that class should have been. Because no one's ever told them that you have to do what the grownup says just because the grownup is a grownup. Because no one's managed to convince them yet that different = bad and that cruelty = a good way of dealing with difference. And I hope to god that no one ever can.

I just don't have it in me...

...to argue.

...to stand up for myself.

...to risk rejection.

...to be honest.

...to hope.

...to try.

EPIC FAIL. Better luck next week...

</self-involved whining>