Goodness, I'm rather surprised that the judge said that. Modern public education does not seem to me to be particularly interested in patriotism or loyalty to the state. In 1961 it was, but now it's a different story. These are not things I think of either. However it's worth noting that adults who were homeschooled are, in fact, more likely to be voters, active in their communities, and all that good stuff. So it appears that we're generally doing OK in that department even without having it as a particular goal. I certainly plan to teach my kids to be active and interested citizens, even if we don't spend lots of time "teaching loyalty to the state."

We have not had it. I didn't do anything special. We've had a couple of small colds and my oldest and I both have sore throats right now (which I dread, as I'm susceptible to laryngitis). I don't know how we missed it, but our turn might be next!

Same here. My husband has always been enthusastic about homeschooling, but he doesn't do much. He's too busy starting a company and keeping a roof over our heads. :p

HNN is CNN's "Headline News" channel. It's not CNN, but one of their subchannels, because apparently there's just too much news to be contained in one 24-hour news channel. We need 3 or 4 from each company. :D In further news, Beck will also be doing in-depth discussion on homeschooling on tomorrow's radio show. (My husband is feeding me this information; he's a Beck addict.)

It appears that Glenn Beck will be doing a fairly big segment on homeschooling tonight on his TV show on HNN. He's very pro-homeschooling, so I hope it goes well. OTOH he can get a little...excited. Looking forward to it!

Ha, I had given up expecting to see those segments show up! My park group was interviewed for it--we're the 5 seconds of outdoor footage in the middle of the second segment (Jennifer and Stephanie). Nope, I'm not one of them, thank goodness. That was back in November and the interviewer said it should show up in a couple of weeks. I'm glad it came out well; we were very trepidatious about the whole thing. :)

Oh yes. I have often noticed this. It amuses me to see how very often far-left and far-right people do the same thing, if for different reasons.

I agree. There's no way we can depend on a few celebrities to come in on our side if there's a fight. It would be nice if some did, since that would be a good publicity move (unless it's a crazy celebrity like Tom Cruise), but I wouldn't bet on it; they're not generally doing the same sort of thing that we are.

I agree with this. The thought of some sort of mentoring program or classes developed by experienced homeschoolers is pretty neat. (After all, it's only a little different than all those conference lectures and seminars we attend in droves.) My problem is that what the state would want is almost certainly something very different and would be more about exerting control than about helping homeschoolers reach their own educational goals. The people who want the state to control homeschooling have little sympathy with the ideals of homeschoolers, and are usually the same people who want universal preschool from age 3, full-time day care from birth, and who generally just think the state can do a much better job than all those incompetent parents out there. Which makes me start thinking that maybe we should be getting in before the state does...I dunno, how would you even do such a thing?

About whether I would follow such a law, I'd have to think about it! I'm an ornery sort, so my first instinct is to go underground. OTOH, my religion has a lot to say about following laws, so I'd probably have to squash my natural woman and go jump through a few hoops. :p Or my brother was recently tossing around the idea of trying to open up a classical charter school around here...maybe I'd do that!

I also like Spelling Workout. My kid likes workbooks, and the "puzzles" make it a little more fun for her. She's one of those 'natural spellers' so I just have her do the lesson on Monday, and then a test on Friday. It's very low-effort, which lets me put my work in somewhere it's more needed, and we still have a real spelling program. I think we're on C now; since she's been doing Italic cursive, it was a little hard for her to read the cursive at first, but I figured that's a skill she would need anyway, and she got it pretty quick.

I don't see how it could be done, from a practical standpoint. A huge amount of a teaching credential is crowd control, how to handle a classroom, plus educational theory and so on. A lot of it doesn't apply to homeschoolers anyway. And as above, if you have an elementary certificate what do you do when you get to high school? I think they'd have to come up with a special kind of certificate just for people planning to homeschool! If they wanted it to be any kind of useful--which they don't. It's much more about state control and union control than it is about whether an ordinary person is intelligent enough to teach a child to read. I have a master's degree; I'm better educated on paper than many teachers. More to the point (and far more importantly), I am a well-read and intelligent person who is more concerned with my children's education than anyone else is, and perfectly able to do any research I need to do. What good would we get out of spending years jumping through hoops and taking classes that don't apply to our situation? (Besides spending a lot of money and time--) If I want to know how to teach 4th grade science, I can figure it out myself with the resources available to me (for free).

I try to do quite a lot. My kids are still young, 7 and 4. For the oldest, she has group classes 2x/week, homeschool parkday once a week, church (ours has an hour main service and then 2 hours of class with peers) and I would be happy if we played with friends most days of the week. In reality, I'm not quite sure how often she sees friends outside of activities--4x/week at least? We allow sleepovers but so far have only had a couple, and one resulted in insomnia, ack! I like her friends; if I didn't think they were nice kids, we wouldn't be hanging out with them. I feel that she gets plenty of time in the family along with the time she has for friends, and also plenty of "bored" time; both girls have wonderful imaginations and use them constantly. If you're looking to limit time, I think the "closed/open days" idea is a good one. You might also think about limiting screen-time in favor of bored-time?

Go to the gym or exercise at home. Next fall I want to start walking in the morning with two friends, too. I grab chances to sew, read a lot, and have a weekly date night with my husband.

I have been very happy with our flannel sheets from Target. As for cotton I cannot say, for I do not love mine!

Mine are organized in bits all over the house, according to a rather idiosyncratic system. On my largest wall I keep literature, history, poetry, book sets, and a bunch of other miscellaneous subjects. My husband has a shelf each for chess and science. The religion books are in the living room, plus the library shelves. The schoolroom has my own collection of children's lit, folk/fairy tales, and children's poetry, plus SF/fantasy/mysteries, random stuff like my books from library school and Christmas books and so on. The homeschooling books are by subject on their own shelves. The kids' bookshelf has the top two shelves for older books, the middle shelf for nice large books (D'Aulaires, nursery rhymes, whatever), the next one for board books, and the bottom shelf for picture books. My special current books live on our headboard, which is a bookshelf.

I have several friends who have teetered on the fence, and I've talked with them and lent them books. One was determined that her kids were never going back to That School, and homeschooled them through K12 for 6 months until they moved to another state and went back to PS. For them it was a desperate measure. One wanted to do it, started for a couple of months, but found her older son too difficult. I suspect that she may try it again sometime. One will probably do it if PS starts not working for her kids, but her son loves school and would be pretty resistant to her teaching him. And one would be homeschooling with or without me, but I've lent her things and we've talked. Her older, teenage son's experience has soured her on PS, and she has a 4yo she plans to homeschool all the way through.

We used it and liked it fine, and I'll use it for my other daughter too. It's a bit on the girly side, but if your kids are girls that's no problem. :p

What first sparked me was reading WTM (my oldest was 2 at that time). I happened to pick up a book that profiled homeschoolers at the library, and thought I would read a little more about this interesting phenomenon. The first couple of books I read were not really all that impressive, but when I picked up WTM, suddenly it was like someone had laid out my personal ideal education for me. I had never once considered homeschooling before then. I spent the next two years waffling and trying to make a decision, and then took the plunge.

I voted other. I do wear some foundation and powder every day; I have rosacea, which makes me rather pink, and it helps me look normal! I don't wear lipstick or eyeshadow very much, just to more special things. I wish I didn't have to wear it all the time, but I feel self-conscious without it now.

There's something great about most of our subjects, I think. I'm not a big math person, but I get very excited to see our daughter (7yo) pick up on the new concepts. Latin and grammar are cool because we're learning them together, and Latin is very exciting! My big favorites are reading and history, like the OP. I'm just thrilled to be able to introduce my kids to my favorite books and that we can learn all this great stuff. And science is also great--especially because we're now in astronomy (my favorite) and then chemistry (my other favorite). I even think copywork is neat. Thinking and planning is probably more exciting than doing daily lessons, though. I get all the fun of imagining, instead of the reality of interruptions and struggles!

Are you on hormonal BC? Like I posted in the other thread, the Pill totally flattened me. It was a slow, gradual decline.

Last fall I went to a SWB seminar. At one point she asked us to raise our hands if we felt inadequately educated--not so much unqualified to teach our kids, but just not properly prepared for Life in General. I think about 90% of the audience raised their hands. Her point was partly that because our own educations were mostly so unsystematic and shallow, we never feel like we quite know everything we're supposed to know--even when we've got PhDs. Anyway, yes, I do feel inadequate. My daughter is in second grade and learning points of grammar I was never taught. Luckily I can turn it into a bit of an advantage; I can tell her from experience that grammar is important to know, and we can learn it together--which makes her happy. So I'm not sure what my point is here, but I guess we just keep on trying. At least we have the advantage of knowing that there's a lot we don't know!

Bwahahah! Yeah, that's a little familiar. But I have to say that this pendulum-swinging thing is better than when I was on the Pill and it took a lot of work just to relax. It would be nice if I could just spread it out over weeks instead of this cyclical thing...

1. A yummy burrito after working all morning. 2. Benadryl cream, because I'm allergic to mosquito bites and it reduces the swelling and pain. 3. This week in my town, when spring starts. Almond, plum, and tulip trees are all in bloom. It's the time of year when driving down the street makes me thrilled to live here.