Love in a Time of Homeschooling (Laura Brodie)Still, long-term homeschooling held no allure for me. I wanted plenty of time for my own teaching and writing and solitude. One year was the limit of my excitement.
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COMMENT: Interestingly, one of the many reasons long-term homeschooling
p. 67
None of these authors described the daily struggles of homeschooling. They mulled over curricula and philosophies and all the flaws of traditional schools, but they didn't discuss the power struggles and irrational moments of fury that emerge in any family, however loving.
Maybe they wanted to protect their children's privacy. Maybe they didn't want to reveal their families dark sides. Or perhaps they all enjoy perfect parent-child relationships, with minimal arguing, whining, and teeth-nashing.
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COMMENT: Or maybe it's some combination of the above, Laura: respecting the privacy of one's family members, protecting them from the others' ill- or uninformed judgment, and, yeah, enjoying some pretty durned good relationships.
p. 140
Fortunately, after a few conversations on the difference between good words and bad, Rachel had cleaned up her act, but I discovered over time that I didn't mind the occasional shit, damn, or crap so much as the shallow drivel that many elementary-age children were absorbing from American pop culture: daily discussions of who was cool and was not cool, whose clothes were pathetic, what boy was hot. Compared to all the gossip about social winners and losers, Rachel's second-grade profanity sounded downright eloquent.
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COMMENT: Agreed.
p. 141
Homeschooling offered the chance to fill the gaps in my own education, let alone Julia's.
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COMMENT: This is a fairly common observation among home educators. The opportunity to address the shortcomings of one's own educations is, after all, one of the great gifts of homeschooling.
p. 236
It might seem strange: you'd think that a ten-year-old would know how to ride a bike already. Most children master the feat somewhere between ages four and eight. But traffic on our road comes too fast to make the street a child's playground, and our neighborhood has no cohort of bike riding kids to inspire my girls. Our house is situated too far from town for a child to ride a bike to school or the library, and most of our family excursions take place on mountain trails, not roads suitable for bikes. As a result, none of my girls had learned how to ride a bike, an omission that nagged at my conscience.
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COMMENT: We thought they'd learn when we moved to the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie, but they ended up learning how canter and jump...
... a couple of years before they learned to ride bikes. And that's okay (even if some folks do think it's strange).
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