I'm not sure if this is a problem or a blessing. ;) DS and I get done with school really, really quickly. I was surprised to see how many people here do school in the early elementary years for 3-4 hours a day. DS is 7 and we started second grade about a month ago, and we sometimes go for an hour and twenty minutes or so, but most days we only go for an hour. I feel like we do quite a bit each day, in terms of content. Our typical schedule would be: Some work on a memory poem Math--a lesson in CLE, and a page or two from Math Mammoth Latin--we're going through Prima Latina orally Language Arts--a lesson from R&S Grammar, a lesson from WWE 1 (we started that about halfway through last year), and a few pages from Spelling Workout Handwriting--a few lines from Getty-Dubay (DS hates handwriting, and giving him more than that would be asking for a lot of grumbling and stress at this point) History--a chapter from SOTW or CHOW and maybe a library book on the same topic Some art or music Fridays we just do a unit from RSO Life and math. Anyway, I feel like we're doing quite a bit, but we still often just take an hour, and almost never go over an hour and a half unless DS is really, really complaining. On the one hand, I'm inclined to see this as a positive for right now. We have a one year old and a baby due in August, and getting through the basics in a short period of time will certainly make doing school this year easier than if I needed to figure out how to fit in 3-4 hours of instruction. On the other hand, I don't want to shortchange DS. I do plan on having a more rigorous 3rd grade year, with more writing. One of the issues, I think, is that since handwriting is stressful and unpleasant for DS right now, I don't insist on as much of it as he could do; we go over Prima Latina's workbook work orally, I make him worksheets for the Rod and Staff lessons rather than having him rewrite all of the exercises, and in general I just don't force a ton of handwriting. That would certainly add more time, but I also feel like it would make both of us miserable. I'm seeing improvements in his handwriting, and his ability to tolerate it, so I'm inclined to not push for more, but just let him get more comfortable with it so that next year we can begin to include substantially more writing from him. ETA: He does do educational things outside of formal school time. He reads, he plays with Snap Circuits and his microscope, he writes stories and makes board games and does lots of things like that. I don't count that stuff as school, though. Anyway, am I shortchanging DS by having such a short school day? Should I not worry about it? Are there areas where we could beef things up?

DS has been doing Prima Latina (orally, no written work) for second grade. I've been looking at future Latin curricula, and honestly I don't see much reason to do more than have some fun learning Latin words and a tiny bit about the structure of the language at this age. I took Latin in college, so I'm somewhat familiar with the language (although that's getting to have been a while ago, and I'm intending to go through Wheelock--the text I used in college--again over the next year or so, just so I'm better equipped to teach DS, and because I think it's fun), but a lot of the Christian Latin (like the prayers) are new to me, so DS has fun with me learning with him. His favorite part of doing Latin is having us take turns quizzing each other on vocabulary, because he loves trying to find a word that will stump me.

My grandmother did a great job balancing her checkbook, too, but my father was in charge of editing her Christmas letter every year, and her grammar was atrocious. She just didn't really write much except for some personal letters to friends, that obviously weren't for public consumption, and her annual Christmas letter which was edited and proofread by somebody else before it was sent out. My father's father only had a seventh grade education, and never read a book the entire time my father knew him. My father's mother did read, and was quite literate, but she was the valedictorian of her class, so she wasn't exactly average; she had to take care of her siblings after her mother died when she was 16, so she never got to further her education past high school, but she absolutely could have and is one of the smartest people I've ever known. My mother's father went to college, but he pretty much never wrote, and only read sports biographies as far as anybody could tell. Both my MIL and FIL, who have high school diplomas and were educated in the 1950s, are terrible writers. They can't manage a one-sentence FB comment or e-mail without a few grammatical or spelling errors, and that's pretty much the only writing either does. My father is a very good writer, but he has a degree in English and a graduate degree, and likes to write (never-to-be-published) novels in his spare time, so I wouldn't really consider his writing ability representative of everybody in his generation. Anecdotally, most of the young people I know are better writers than the older people I know, and write and read more than older people do.

If you were born in 1979, you actually should have learned to read in the era when whole language was supposedly all that was being taught, since you'd have been in elementary school in the 1980s, the heyday of whole language. The fact that you were taught phonics even then shows that phonics never really disappeared from our public schools the way we are sometimes led to believe. There was a very brief period of time where phonics fell out of favor in some districts; since at least the mid-1990s, though, phonics has been taught in nearly all public school classrooms. Whole language instruction began in the 1970s, and I think you'd probably have found far more whole language classrooms then than in the 1990s. I've seen no evidence that actual literacy rates have declined, much less declined significantly, since 1979. Certainly the rates of functional illiteracy are higher than they should be, but we don't really know what the rates of functional illiteracy were in the past, because nobody measured them. Literacy wasn't based on whether you could read well enough to function in modern society, but whether you could read, period. So, comparing rates of functional literacy today to rates of literacy in the past is another apples-to-oranges comparison. I guess I don't see why we can't acknowledge that the public schools are, for the most part, turning out students who are no less literate than in the past and still feel that homeschooling is the right choice for our families and our children.

Where did you read this? Because, honestly, all evidence I've seen indicates that the high school education the average person received 50 years ago was much less intensive and advanced, particularly in terms of math and science, than the average high school education today. Reading and writing instruction hasn't become much more intensive at the high school level, but it's certainly much more intensive in the lower grades today. I don't know, I've noticed that a lot of times people who want to claim educational decline will compare the education the most privileged people in society received 50 or 100 years ago to the education the average person receives today. That's just not a fair or accurate comparison. I think we need to consider that the average person today does far more public writing (and probably more writing, period, from all the stats I've seen) than the average person in the past. We now have ways to make anybody's writing public. So, of course it's going to look like writing skills have declined! For a very long time, we really only read the work of edited, published authors, and maybe the occasional proofread memo or letter. It seems to me that the massive increase in the amount of writing out there for us to read, most of it in contexts where immediacy is privileged over accuracy, is going to skew perceptions a great deal, but doesn't indicate anything about actual skill levels.

Again, though, that's comparing apples to oranges. We've seen an extremely significant increase in the number of students taking the SAT. When only the best students were taking the SAT, of course we'd expect to see higher scores, and of course we'd expect to see scores drop as more and more students (which amounts to more and more lower-performing students) begin to take it. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy appears to be the largest historical look at literacy in the U.S. that I can find, and it indicates that literacy rates have been steadily rising for over 120 years. http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

Is there actual, empirical evidence of this? Do we know for sure that young people today are less literate in some absolute sense than people in the past, using measures that compare like groups of people (i.e., not comparing college students from two generations ago to college students today, given the massive increase in the number of students in college)?

I never understood why anybody would run away and join a convent before I had kids. Now I sometimes fantasize about living somewhere where everybody had taken a vow of silence.

That's true. But I think, when we're talking about matters that we simply cannot conclusively know the full and absolute truth about, a degree of humility is required, as well as the recognition that it's fully possible for kind, caring, decent, moral, sincere, truth-seeking people to come to radically different conclusions on these matters. So I agree that people think their faith is right, but I also think that has to come with the knowledge that you could be wrong and the humility that goes along with that.

What if somebody isn't aware of whether or not they are able to vote? Again, unless there is evidence that these people are actually voting, then I don't think mistakes in voter registration are an issue. In reality, it seems like "voter fraud" is a specter invented by the political right to pass laws that actually end up disenfranchising groups traditionally inclined to vote Democrat. The whole idea of "voter fraud" seems like, IMO, a sneaky way to actually *commit* voter fraud, by passing unconstitutional laws and intimidating people into thinking they don't have the right to vote. Now, if we really want to talk about problems with voting and laws that circumvent democracy, I'd love to talk about the felony disenfranchisement laws that have led to 1/3 of black men in Florida being permanently disenfranchised.

Are they confusing them, or making careless errors? I certainly know the difference between those things, but have made those errors when typing quickly. (In fact, just now I wrote "I certainly no" on the first pass, and quickly corrected it, despite being fully aware of the difference between "no" and "know.") Have you ever read an early draft by a very skilled author? A self-published book by somebody who you know is a competent author? They are often riddled with grammatical errors. It's not that the author is a poor writer or lacks knowledge of grammar, but that their objective in the first draft is to simply get ideas down. One thing I think we fail to recognize is that there is a trade-off in communication: immediacy often comes at the expense of accuracy. We all accept this in speech. If you transcribe pretty much anybody's casual speech, it is riddled with all sorts of non-standard grammatical structures. But, we understand that they are communicating in a very spontaneous way, and accept it. The thing is, I think, that today there is a lot more opportunity for immediate, spontaneous communication taking place in writing than there ever was in the past. Honestly, the only parallel I can think of to things like e-mail, IMs, texts, message boards, and Facebook are the notes we'd pass to our friends in junior high, and I really doubt those were testaments to grammatical mastery. You simply can't compare a blog post or status update or forum post by a young person today to a letter composed by somebody in the past. The blog post/status update/forum post is intended as a form of immediate, spontaneous communication in most cases, while the letter is not. I do think we need to accept that whenever writing becomes more immediate and spontaneous, for most people it will also become less accurate/error-free. That's true today, and it was true a generation ago, and it was true four generations ago. Personally, I'm willing to make that trade-off. When I'm involved in a forum discussion somewhere, I'd rather get somebody's spontaneous, immediate response, than have them take the time to go through the kind of revision process that many people--no matter how knowledgeable about grammar or how well-schooled in phonics--must go through in order to produce error-free prose. I don't want to lose that spontaneous aspect of communication, any more than I'd want my friends to write out what they were going to say before they said it to me, lest they make an error when talking. But that is going to mean having to accept a higher level of errors than those of us who grew up reading very little writing that was spontaneous and casual are used to seeing.

Was there drinking at the bridal shower? That could explain it. We had a baby shower for a friend when I was in grad school. One of our games was reading Ann Landers columns and providing advice. I don't recall anybody having any trouble reading or understanding anything. I find this kind of thing very surprising. I teach writing classes at an inner city university. Even in my remedial classes, my students, for the most part, have no trouble with basic reading and comprehension skills, and many of them come from extremely low-performing public schools. So I find all of these stories of apparently well-educated young people who are unable to read quite foreign to my experience.

I'm honestly not sure what the double standard is. People are free to say they disagree with your beliefs, and even to mock and insult them; you, in turn, are free to say that you disagree with their beliefs, and even to mock and insult them. However, neither of you is able, in the cases mentioned, to force the other to actually live in a way contrary to your own values. Yes, you are expected to be tolerant of people having views different from your own, just as they are tolerant of you. Who is trying to pass laws making it illegal for conservative Christians to marry or adopt children? To force conservative Christians to have abortions? To try to make being a Christian a grounds for being fired from your job? I don't see anybody doing those things, and to me that's what would be a double standard.

I tend to think that Christians in the United States who feel they are persecuted need to sit down and read Acts. I'm a Christian, and I certainly don't feel persecuted or discriminated against in any way. I work in academia, I know that many people do not share my beliefs, but to describe holding a view that is a minority view in some settings, or perhaps an unpopular view in some settings, as "persecution" seems way off-base to me.

I absolutely believe that voter fraud is extremely rare. The penalties for engaging in it are incredibly stiff, and the payoff is very slight. I don't think you are going to find many people willing to risk jail time to get one or two extra votes. I mean, goodness, look at our voter turnout rates! People don't even take advantage of their one legal vote. I just don't see voter fraud having much if any appeal. Voter registration issues are a different matter altogether. There have certainly been cases of voter registration fraud, where partisan groups that have been collecting registrations have "lost" the registration forms for those voting for the other party. There have also been cases of people being registered multiple times, either because they registered with more than one address (think college students registering both at their campus address and their home address), or because the person entering the form information mis-entered some part of the information and created two registrations, or where somebody unthinkingly registered more than once (maybe they were approached by more than one person doing voter registrations, and forgot they'd filled out a form, or hadn't received their registration yet and figured they should fill out another). But those are more mistakes than actual cases of fraud.

Are you near a campus? One possibility is to post on a public bulletin board letting students know what you are selling. You'll make a lot more than you would selling them back to the bookstore (although maybe not more than through Amazon), and students will still end up getting them cheaper, in most cases, than if they bought used from the bookstore.

My DS was an only for 6 years. He was a tough baby, and my pregnancy with him was awful, and it took us that long to feel ready for another. He's now having to adjust to having two new siblings within 16 months (DD was born last March, and DS2 is due in early August). He's doing great with the change, and loves being a big brother, but I'm not sure DD really provides a great social outlet for him. He tends to relate to her more as a babysitter than as a friend, if that makes sense. At times they do play and have a great time, but certainly his relationship with her won't provide him with the social outlet--at least not for many years--that DD and DS2 will probably provide one another with, being so close in age. We still need to get out and get him around kids his age, and sometimes having DD along can make that more difficult. I've always wanted a big family, so that's fine with me, but it's one of the things that's harder with two. Other things are easier with two. I did find, personally, that my pregnancies have gotten easier each time. Pregnancy 1 was miserable; pregnancy 2 was better; pregnancy 3 has been so easy that I honestly forget I'm pregnant most of the time, even now at 30 weeks. My DH was an only. He didn't mind, and he would have been okay with us having only one child. The only thing he finds a bit sad/stressful about it is not having siblings now, as an adult. He feels a lot of pressure for having to care for his parents as they age, and we both grew up with loads of aunts and uncles and cousins, so it's kind of weird that our kids only have one aunt and one uncle and probably won't have cousins (my sister and her husband don't plan on having children).

Oh, I agree. And, I spent the last week of this past semester swearing that next time I teach I will not be giving out my e-mail address, because I was so done with students thinking that the internet means that they have constant access to me and that, if I don't respond right away, it's my issue, not theirs. Unfortunately, I really doubt I could get away with that. I keep telling my DH that we need designated internet times in the house; we don't mind paying to have it all the time, but just unplugging it except during certain hours. I have yet to get him on board with this, and lack the willpower to do it myself during the day, at least so far.

I wouldn't assume parental negligence is the issue. I've never been out with kids, particularly young kids, in a yard with a ball, even if there were numerous adults around, when at some point the ball didn't end up going over a fence. It happens. I think it's perfectly appropriate, if it's happening a lot, to say that you'll return the balls once a day, or once a week, whatever makes sense for you. But, it just seems to be one of those things that happens when you have adjacent yards.

But many things we used to do in other ways have been transferred to the internet. And, they can be done cheaper and most quickly via the internet. It's like saying that people should have lived without phones after they were invented, because people had gotten along just fine without them, or that postal service is unnecessary because people survived without it. It's also overlooking how necessary the internet is for many people's jobs. I teach at a college, and as much as I'd love to tell my students that they cannot get in touch with me via the internet, I'm not sure I could get away with that. It's become the primary means of communication between students and instructors outside of class, and is accepted as such. It would be a burden on my family for me to have to travel to the library every day to use the internet for work purposes when I'm teaching. Same with my DH. He's a researcher, and the internet is the main way his colleagues communicate with each other. It's pretty much expected that he can be reached via e-mail outside of work hours--the way a generation ago some jobs expected that workers could be reached via phone outside of work hours, and you couldn't just say "Nope, no phone" and get away with it--and that means having internet access at home. It's also pretty necessary for students. It's expected that the students at my university have regular access to the internet. That's how messages from individual instructors and from the university as a whole are sent out, and a student who goes days without checking the internet is probably going to end up missing some vital information. Yes, it's a pain that it's now expected in many fields that you will be available pretty much all the time via the internet, but that is the expectation. You can certainly set some limits, but just not having regular internet access isn't feasible for many people.

Honestly, if he doesn't see the internet of being of any value to you as a homeschooling mom--especially with one of your DC taking an online class--and you've done your best to explain it to him, it sounds to me like he either wasn't listening or is disregarding your needs. If his opinion is that the internet serves no real purpose, then it sounds to me like you aren't disregarding his opinion, but disagreeing with it for very sound reasons. As mentioned by someone above, homeschooling is your job, or at least one of your jobs. I don't understand the purpose of everything in my husband's lab, but I certainly wouldn't decide that, just because I don't see any value in it, it must be something he could just do away with. I don't know, like many other this rubs me the wrong way, both because it seems very controlling (I'm an egalitarian, but I've read a lot of complementarian stuff, and everything I've read mentions that while wives are commanded to submit, husbands are NEVER commanded to make their wives submit, to test how submissive they are, or to otherwise make submission a condition of their loving concern for their wife and family) and also seems isolating. Homeschooling can be isolating as it is, and I do think that taking away one of the primary means (if not the primary means) that homeschooling parents and students have to share ideas, to get resources, and to otherwise communicate with each other is just not right, unless it was absolutely necessary.

That's a good question; I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure that if you log in using your library account, you only get one hour, but I'm not sure if there's wifi access and if you have to log in to use it or not. We live in a city, and I think the concern is that people would come in and spend the entire day on the computer, keeping others from using it (and sometimes not being very pleasant to the patrons there to look at books).

My local library has a 1 hour daily internet limit. If somebody was taking an online class or using the internet for research purposes, that might not be sufficient.

I've toyed with the idea, but I don't think we could, practically. When I teach, e-mail is how I stay in contact with students outside of class and I use Blackboard on a daily basis for coursework. I use the internet as a homeschooling resource very often. And, my husband also uses the internet for work at home, and without it he'd probably have to spend more time in the lab than he does. It's also how we stay in touch with our parents, who live in different states. For us, it would be more like what going without a phone (before you could use the internet as a phone) would have been like a few years ago, than going without TV. Sometimes I think I'd love to get rid of it, because it does hold so many potentials for distraction, but it's too integral to our work lives at this point. There are a number of other things I'd cut before I'd cut the internet. Honestly, given our lifestyle (we live in a city and work walking distance from home and do most of what we do within walking distance), it would be more practical, and interfere less with our work lives, for us to give up our car than to give up the internet. Is it really about the finances (in our case, we spend about $35/month on internet access, so giving it up for 3 years would save us $1260 total), or is it about your husband being unhappy with the amount of time your family is spending online? Maybe if you addressed the issue of the time spent online, and how it's spent, he'd be less likely to make a financial issue out of it.

I had pretty much no responsibilities other than schoolwork as a child. I didn't know how to cook, do laundry, make a bed, anything, until I left home. There was a bit of a steep learning curve at first, but, honestly, I was able to learn what I needed to learn pretty quickly and without much pain. I agree that personality plays a big role. The primary reason I keep the house neat at all is because messiness drives me crazy, and I can't relax and enjoy anything if I feel like things in the house are out of control. If I could function well in a mess--which my DH can--I doubt I'd have a whole lot of motivation to keep things neat. Another factor I haven't seen mentioned that I think matters is modelling the behavior your parents exhibited, not what was expected of you. I didn't have chores as a child, but my mother and father did a lot around the house. And I kind of have that expectation as an adult: I expect that we'll do chores on the weekend, I expect that I'll have the house cleaned up before I go to bed, etc. I don't think I'm quite as compulsive about it as my mother, but I definitely see myself doing many of the things my mom did when I was a child, now that I'm an adult. My DH, on the other hand, did have a good amount of responsibility as a child, but he loathes doing any chores as an adult. He often falls into the same pattern as his dad, even when he doesn't want to: come home from work, nap on the couch, eat dinner, play a video game or watch TV until bedtime. I'd say he was more influenced by his father's example than the responsibilities he was given as a child. So in some ways I think children learn more about how to handle adult responsibilities by watching the adults in their life handle their responsibilities, instead of from what responsibilities they are given in childhood.