That is great. I find that I need to consider how much I want to vent to DH when DS's attitude about school is bothering me. Because, he hates seeing me stressed out and upset, and wants to fix it, and sending DS to school seems like a fix. It's not that he doesn't like that we homeschool or would prefer DS in school, but just that it is a big stress on him to worry, while he's at work and can't do anything, about what's going on at home. So unless something is a really significant behavior issue, I try not to make a big deal out of day-to-day behavioral stuff. We'll talk generally about improving DS's behavior, but I try to work out the specific issues I have with him during the day on my own, and vent to friends if I need to.

No. I'm not invested in whether my children are patriotic or not. It's important to me that they are good citizens, but honestly I don't really get patriotism and I'd be fine with them being unpatriotic. For me, I'm just not big into group identity. As a kid, I never got school spirit; it made no sense to me why I should be excited about or proud of my school, just because I happened to live in that district. I've never understood getting into sports teams. I tend to shy away from clubs. I can't even bring myself to join a homeschooling co-op or support group, because I don't feel a strong sense of group identity as a homeschooler. I don't think I'm particularly individualistic, but I prefer to form connections based on shared values/shared experiences/shared interests than shared circumstances, which just don't seem meaningful to me. Patriotism, to me, is a pride in one's country because it's the country you live in. You start off assuming that, because you live there, it's good, and then you find reasons to bolster that. I'd prefer to start from the assumption that my nation is no better than any other, and then, if there are specific things my country has done to be proud of, be proud of those specific things. I'd like my children to take pride in the things our nation has done that are worthy of being proud of, and to be thoughtful and honest about the things we've done that we shouldn't be proud of. I don't want them to begin with the assumption that we're somehow a "good" country (I don't think there's any such thing) and fit history into that framework.

:grouphug: I'm due in about six weeks, and I've been having little blow ups about the stupidest things lately. Usually it's a combination of my being hot, tired, and hungry. Suddenly, things that would normally maybe bug me a bit, or that I'd totally overlook, just completely infuriate me. The other day my husband told me, "You seem very emotional lately." The fact that he'd point out something so obvious came very close to setting me off again.

There are a good number of "real life" blogs that I think are more fiction than fact.

You should be fine, but my understanding is that it's ultimately up to the TSA agent. Whenever I've flown with my knitting needles, I've brought a large self-addressed stamped envelope with me, so that if they do decide I can't bring them on, I'm not going to be losing them for good.

You should be fine, but my understanding is that it's ultimately up to the TSA agent. Whenever I've flown with my knitting stuff, I've brought a large self-addressed stamped envelope with me, so that if they do decide I can't bring them on, I'm not going to be losing them for good.

I wouldn't have any safety concerns about sending an over 5 child into the locker room alone, personally, but I'm not the kind of person who thinks pedophiles are hiding in every bush, and I'd assume that after a swim class there'd be other children in there, so he wouldn't be alone. But, I'd have other concerns. I know that, at 6, and maybe even now at 7, my DS was NOT mature or trustworthy enough to go into an area with showers by himself. I'd be far more concerned about his making a flood, or about the danger of a bunch of small boys fooling around in a slippery area.

Nope. I can't remember the last time he wore a tie to work. He does research in a university lab, and it's pretty casual. Even when he goes to meetings, he very, very rarely wears a tie, unless his lab is meeting with pretty high-up people from the corporate world. Then he'll wear one.

A bit. I've read some books about Buddhism, and we used to go to a UU church where there were a good number of Buddhists. But, my DH works in a lab with several Buddhist women from Taiwan, and it seems like Buddhism in practice, especially as practiced by people from Asian countries, is quite a bit different from Buddhism as generally practiced by Americans and that I read about. So I'd say I probably know very little.

I'm not sure I can talk you down from wanting a new baby, but I'm 33 weeks pregnant and it's like 85 degrees in my house right now, and I'm getting horrible acid reflux from just drinking water, and I have sciatica, and my tailbone still hasn't healed from when it broke during DD's delivery, and every time I have to pick her up, it hurts all over, so I might be able to talk you down from wanting to be pregnant again. ;) I've gotten to the point where I don't think I'll ever feel like I'm done having babies, but I'm feeling like I might be at or approaching the point where I'm through with pregnancies. I think my husband is seriously considering having me sign some sort of document certifying that right now, because he's pretty sure in two or three years I'll change my mind.

If you read posts on here about what people think about the sex lives of teens today compared to the sex lives of teens when they were younger, we most certainly do NOT know what these surveys are telling us. There is an almost universal assumption among adults that today's teens are having more sex, and at younger ages, than previous generations. That is simply flat-out wrong, and the only way we know it's wrong--because we can't ask every teen, and many of us base our opinions on extreme anecdotes, sensationalized news stories, and maybe our own sense of moral superiority over this generation of young people--is because of research like this.

I really, really doubt that "political correctness" is the problem. But, it's a shame we don't seem to have access to the text of the actual question.

I just want to underscore this. This is VERY serious for your son. Especially if some of the boys involved are 16+, but even a 4-year age difference, at this point, could make a huge difference legally depending on the laws of your state. We're talking about the very real potential for being brought up on child pornography and/or sexual abuse charges. The fact that this girl has suggestive photos on her FB page is a huge red flag to me that this could turn into a terrible situation if steps aren't taken immediately to bar any and all contact from and with her. It doesn't matter if the contact was unwanted. It doesn't matter if she initiated everything. It doesn't matter if she lied about her age. It doesn't matter if she and her parents don't want any charges brought against anybody. If one of these boys was found with a suggestive picture of her on his phone, or sent to him in an e-mail, or to have lewd texts or FB messages from her, he could be facing extremely serious legal charges. And, in today's climate, these things do not generally get written off as a misunderstanding and get calmly resolved. In situations like this, the older teens are often lucky if they end up with probation, a felony on their record, and a lifetime on a sex offender registry rather than serving time. So this is extremely, extremely serious. Obviously this girl is very troubled, and needs help. But, these boys are also in a very dangerous situation, and I think any adult aware of it needs to take whatever steps are necessary to block any and all online/phone contact with this girl and to make sure that they understand how truly serious it is and that they really cannot have any contact with her at all.

I agree. I find it hard to believe that a 98% error rate would indicate anything other than a poorly-written question or a scoring error. I tend to assume, when I give my students quizzes, that if 40% or more of the class gets a given question wrong, it's possible that the problem was my wording, and I'll review the question to make sure. If 90% of my students got the question wrong, I'd take that as a clear, definitive sign that the problem lay with my question, not with the students. Even if you were to have every student randomly guessing, you'd still expect to have at least 25% of the students get the correct answer. To get a wrong answer rate of 98% is very, very strange.

This has happened to my DH and I so many times. We'll be arguing back and forth about something for a while before it occurs to us that we're actually both on the same page, we're just expressing it differently.

There is no indication that students history knowledge has declined; it's simply remained low. That is exactly what the findings of this test were. Student scores have been abysmally low since the test was first administered; there is no decline. In fact, there's actually been an increase in the performance of the lowest-performing students, albeit a modest one. I'd venture to bet that, if you showed the same question to adults, they'd fare about as well (particularly if they weren't alive in the Brown era) as these students did.

If following a reading list doesn't work for you--and it generally doesn't work for me, either--I'd say exploring areas of particular interest to you might be the way to go. Pick something you're really interested in, and read books about it, download lectures about it, learn all you can about it. I've found that, when I do that, it automatically leads me into looking into other subjects and other areas so that I can more fully understand the thing I'm primarily interested in, and now I have a real reason for and interest in doing so.

If pedophilia is really something that cannot be cured, and that therefore would need a cure, why not just lock these people up in a psychiatric facility for life, the way we'd lock up anybody else who had a mental disorder that was incurable and rendered them a threat to society? I guess I don't see any reason to subject this man or anybody else to torture or disfigurement.

Given that I thought our schools were being overrun by PC ideologies and that all students learned about was black history, that just makes no sense at all. I think the real reason is probably because very few U.S. history courses make it past WWII, if they even get there. In all my years of history classes, the only time I ever studied the civil rights era was in AP U.S. History, when my teacher made it a point to focus on mid-to-late twentieth century history because she knew that none of us had covered it before. In other classes where we were supposed to cover it, we never made it that far into the textbook.

For your son's own protection, I would block that girl's number from his phone. God forbid she ever sent him a suggestive picture or lewd text, he could be in very, very serious trouble, whether he wanted the interactions or not. I'd also make sure that he had no further online or phone-based communication with her, for his own legal protection. These situations can turn into very, very serious legal problems, unfortunately. I may be paranoid, but I've heard of too many cases of older teens being brought up on child porn or abuse charges because of situations like this. And the problem is that, if you approach her parents, they may get angry and defensive and turn around and try to blame everything on your son, which would be a bad situation. ETA: I don't want to see insensitive to this girl's plight. I would imagine that if she's acting out this way, there are some very serious problems in her life. But, the sad fact is that people end up spending their lives on the sex offender registry because of situations like this. I think your first priority has to be making sure that this girl is barred from having any further online or textual communication with your son, because he is in a very vulnerable position otherwise. After that, I'd consider alerting the school counselor, as somebody else suggested.

I'm also of the mindset that, if a decision must be made right now--and sometimes sitting on something for a while can be the best option, and lead to a more productive discussion in the future--it should be made by the person who will be most impacted by that decision or who is most invested in that decision. So, for example, if we have a disagreement over where our money is going that we can't come to a compromise on, I'll defer to DH because he is the one bringing in the vast majority of our income. If we have a disagreement over discipline we can't come to a compromise on, he'll defer to me, because I'm the one who is doing most of the discipline. That happens very rarely, though. We've had very few decisions that had to be made before we could come to an agreement or compromise.

I'm not sure how old you are, but if you are younger than your 50s, there's a good chance that surveys like this were given while you were in school, just not in your school. Obviously every schoolchild in the country isn't being surveyed, because that's not how survey research works. They're not taking a census, but looking for a representative sample. So, the vast majority of schools will not be participating in this survey. I was never given a survey like this, either. But, back when I was a teenager in the 90s, they were collecting this sort of data. I'm just at a loss for why people think this information is so useless. When we're going to have public policy debates over, say, whether sex ed should be taught in school, and what kind, and people make claims like "If we teach sex ed, more kids will have sex," isn't it useful to find out whether or not that's true? If we're going to see teen pregnancy as a social problem, shouldn't we have the facts on how many teens are actually having sex, and whether they are using birth control or not? If we're going to make the sex lives of teens a matter of public interest, and something we think is our business--and when people here say that part of the reason that they don't send their kids to ps is because of how much sex the kids there are supposedly having, they ARE making it a matter of public interest--then wouldn't we want accurate data to go on? If we want to say, "The sex lives of teens are nobody's business," then fine. But if we want to make the sex lives of teens our business, but then just go on anecdotes and our own sense that today's teens must be much more promiscuous than teens back when we were growing up (which these statistics proves to be completely false), that is not right. If we're going to make the sex lives of teens our business, then we owe it to them to get our facts straight, and this is the only way I know of to do it. Honestly, part of me wonders if the reason we're so suspicious of this research is because it proves our biases wrong. Today's teens are having less, not more, sex than teens a generation or two ago. Maybe we just don't want to hear that, and would rather rely on news reports about "rainbow parties" and Lifetime TV movies to get our information about what the sex lives of teens are like, so we can make sure we don't have to question our assumption that today's teens are the most immoral, hedonistic generation yet.

Knowing several people who do human subjects research, I really don't think anonymity should be a concern. The requirements for anonymity for any type of survey research are strict; the requirements for anonymity for survey research about sex are stricter; I simply cannot fathom how strict the anonymity requirements for survey research on the sex lives of teens would be. This isn't a "Sure, it's anonymous" wink-wink situation. It would be an extremely serious ethical violation--the kind that destroys careers--for a person to in any way disseminate the information in these surveys without complete anonymity of participants. I'm not even sure how people think the teachers could read the responses, if they wanted to. The teacher is not doing anything with these surveys. I would imagine that the students may be sealing them up themselves, but if not the teacher would be required to immediately seal the surveys away. They would simply not be given the opportunity to examine them. I would imagine that the teachers are actually barred from reading the responses, since they are not the ones giving the survey and so have no access to the results until the results are actually published. AFAIK, surveys of this kind have been given since at least 1988. I am not aware of a single instance in which there was a breach of confidentiality.

I think it probably should go to whoever ordered the meal. But, I know from long experience that if I don't eat leftovers within 24 hours, DH considers them fair game. At least he gives me that long. ;)

Not unless you count me. But, at this point, even if we could afford it, I wouldn't think it was necessary. We have a very small home, so it just doesn't take a lot of time to clean. If we had a larger home and more money, though, I can definitely see having somebody come in to clean once every week or two.