Holy Sh!t, Our School Is Closing

Rarely these days do I feel compelled to write anything in the ole "Our Homeschool Mystery" blog so here is a short update on life... I drove Rebecca, who is now 15, home from her English 101 class this morning, while Patrick, who is now 17, has a slightly longer college geography class on Thursdays where he is predicting weather and doing research on the "urban heat island" phenomenon. They are excited to be going to a dance with their homeschool friends tomorrow night, as they get together on most Fridays with homeschooled teens. They are still involved with the homeschool theatre group. They still volunteer three hours per week at the natural history museum. Patrick still does homeschool fencing classes, and he now also has a paying job at the library 19 hours per week. Rebecca still plays horn in the youth symphony. The only big difference schooling-wise is that I have now farmed out the rest of their homeschool education to the local community college so they can be taught by people above my level and receive college credit, as well. They are both taking a full load of classes there and enjoying themselves, and I have gone back to work full-time; although, it is self-scheduling so I am mostly able to set my work schedule around their homeschool needs.

As Rebecca and I came closer to our neighborhood this morning, we drove by her old school from many years ago. You may remember my very first "Our Homeschool Mystery" blogpost where I gave a little description of our short time at the school in "Secrets of the Old Schoolhouse" (linkable post.) Over the years, we have driven by the school, often to fun field trips and other activities during school hours, and felt pity for the kids stuck in this lifeless building. I am not trying to be mean, but I started with a barren slate of dirt in my backyard and the kids' great-grandmother's furniture, and over the last 17 years, the kids and I have planted gardens and trees, acquired books and musical instruments, and our house now looks like any other homeschooler's does with projects and curriculum overflowing everywhere you look. Meanwhile, 17 years later, our neighborhood school still looks like this:

On Tuesday night, the school district voted to close this school at the end of this school year. In our local election last fall, the district was unable to get a budget override passed that would have helped with the $2.7 million budget shortfall so our elementary school will be closed, and the 584 school-less students will be bussed to the three remaining elementary schools in the district, ranging from 3 to 11 miles away. Besides the additional wear-and-tear on our environment from bussing, the kids will be on the road more with less time for extra-curriculars, and on top of that, the school district also elected to go to a 4-day school week, making for longer school days during the remaining four days of instruction. But wait, there's more!!! The district also approved an increase in class size to absorb all of these extra kids. So your child's kindergarten class may now have up to 31 students in there, and your teenager may be in a class with up to 40 students!!!!!! Because we all know that larger class size IMPROVES the quality of education! (Yes, that's sarcasm!)

I've gone through a range of emotions upon hearing this news. Some guilt for having pulled my kids out instead of staying to fix the problems. Some dread about worrying about my decreasing property value now that I won't have a nearby school. Some sadness because my school has a great SPEER program and all those special-ed preschoolers and elementary-schoolers will no longer have a home with a dedicated group of teachers and nurses. But mostly, my emotion is one of complete and utter DISGUST in my fellow humans. If one more person tells me that they don't vote because they feel they "can't change anything," I swear that I'm going to punch them in the face. The election last fall that decided the school's fate, the budget override, actually had an increase in the number of eligible voters that voted. Want to know that percentage?? 43% !! Less than half of all eligible voters bothered to come out (or mail-in) their ballot that would decide the fate of an entire elementary school. You non-voters are pathetic and are victims of this crappy education system that somehow managed to graduate you without teaching you the basics of civic education and responsibility to your community. And for those of you whining in comments sections of articles about this decision, saying that the school board should have "balanced the budget," you need to go back to school and retake math because you aren't getting it -- there's not enough money going to schools! Get it? NOT ENOUGH MONEY FOR EDUCATION. You get what you pay for in life, and if you don't want to invest in our future generation, then don't expect them to solve these problems for you.

Let's Talk About Risk

Don't you hate it when you meet someone who is anti-homeschooling? It's so tiring. You can provide mountains of evidence that your child is well-adjusted:

• Socialized. Check - child is frequently photographed hanging on large group of friends, constantly texting and going to parties.
• Intelligent. Check - child is 16 and has finished all lower division general ed at community college with a 3.8 GPA.
• Community-oriented. Check - child has held down two volunteer jobs for the last 3 years.
• Polite. Check - child greets people with handshake, makes eye contact, and can hold down a conversation.
• Egalitarian. Check - child has witnessed both mom and dad working during their childhood.
• Diverse. Check - child has participated in scouts, theatre, soccer, teeball, basketball, fencing, chess team, hiking club, dance classes, art classes, foreign language classes, band, symphony, museum guild, etc., etc...

But still . . . "I just don't believe in homeschooling." 

Ugh. 

Do you want college acceptance rates for homeschoolers? Nah. How about standardized test scores for homeschoolers? Nah. How about convicted felon rates among homeschoolers? Nah.

This is exactly what it's like when you meet someone who is anti-vaccination. 

Do you want CDC, NIH, or AMA recommendations? Nah. Do you want peer-reviewed PubMed articles on vaccination safety and effectiveness? Nah. Do you want the advice of a trusted friend who is also a registered nurse? Nah.

The difference here is that when my kids were little, I would come home from homeschool park days and study microbiology textbooks and take exams. Hard exams. All while I was homeschooling with you. On my shelf right now, I am looking at "Microbiology," "Pathophysiology," "Pharmacology," "Essentials of Pediatric Nursing," "Critical Care Nursing," and the "NCLEX-RN Study Guide" which I practically memorized to take my State Board Exam so I could get a license to practice my "voodoo witchcraft" that advocates vaccinations for the health of your child and states that I am a Registered Nurse with Multi-State Privileges. 

And I homeschooled right along side you all of the way. I breastfed with you. I shared granola with you. But I can no longer stay silent about this anti-vaccination madness. 

You have been getting away with not vaccinating because other people have been vaccinating. They have been vaccinating for YEARS now; it is not new. You have forgotten what a sick kid looks like. You need to take a PALS (Pediatric Advance Life Support) class with me and watch videos of toddlers in respiratory distress from Hib. You need to see kids in the Third World with deformed limbs from polio. You need to WAKE UP. Eradicating disease requires a collective. You have to be willing to say, "I will accept this vaccination, even if I don't understand the science behind it, because I want what's best for the greatest number of people." I'm telling you: I understand the science, and it's safe. I'm risking my license, my career, and my friendship with you to tell you that vaccines are safe.

So let's talk about risk. This morning (after getting mad at ignorance on the internet) I was thinking about all of the risks that we take as humans. There are so many things. Being alive is even a risk. For some reason, I was thinking about a time when I was sixteen and on a flight with my dad who has now passed away, and I miss him. We were flying from our home in Germany to Bucharest, and I was positively terrorized. There are some mountains, the Transylvanian Alps, I believe, that are actually part of the Carpathians, and you descend down over them on your way into Bucharest. Those mountains made for the bumpiest flight I have ever been on. It was absolutely horrible, and I still cite that flight as one of the worst I have ever taken. After landing, I was completely determined that I was not going home on a plane. We were visiting friends at the embassy there, and my poor parents had to endure their weird teenage daughter looking up train schedules and talking about plane crashes the whole week that we were there. Since they weren't budging on the train idea, I started planning my life there in Romania; I would meet a nice Romanian boy, get married, have a family, and hopefully my friends would come visit me there since I wasn't ever leaving. 

After many ultimatums, my parents were able to get me on my death flight home. My dad, who was an aerospace engineer, sat next to me and explained EVERY little thing going on with the plane. Every little noise. Every little part, right down to the hydraulics. I was particularly afraid of the hydraulics -- God knows what they did, but they seemed to be implicated in more than one plane crash. I didn't understand anything he was telling me. To this day, I don't really understand all of the science involved in our modern-day jets, but I accept and respect the people that dedicate their lives to studying aerospace safety, and I realize that I don't have that expertise. Sure, I can read all about plane crashes on the internet, but when I actually crunch the numbers I can see that flying is safe. 

Risk is all around us. It is a risk to fly. It is a risk to drive. It is a risk to turn your back on the predominant educational system in our country and do it yourself. And it is a risk to get a vaccine that you think is injecting "toxins" into your body when it is actually a simple way to expose antigens of a pathogen to produce antibodies that keep you well. Please, if you are a homeschooler that vaccinates, can you please stand up and be counted? I fear that there are so few of us in our community that we need to be more vocal. And to all of my "friends" that think they know more about vaccines than I do: maybe we're not really friends if you don't respect that I am BOTH a homeschooling parent and a nurse that has studied this subject extensively and cares deeply about your health.

End of Our One Year Blog Project

Wow! We started this blog back in January 2010 as a way to enlighten folks about our homeschooling. It's fun to go back and read what we have all written, back to back, chronologically. I think we've done the best possible job we can at giving a window into our atypical world. I hope we've answered your burning homeschooling questions! When we first started out, we didn't have a way to see if anyone was reading the blog; however, since then, Blogger has added a "Stats" tab, and we now know that our little homeschooling blog has received over 5000 page views from 10 different countries. We've done very little to advertise, but I think more and more people are searching out information about homeschooling. I hope we have given a realistic and positive light on the subject. I have never looked at our homeschooling as anything other than, "Okay, we'll give this a try and see how it goes," and here we are nearly 5 years later still homeschooling. I don't know what the future holds: Patrick says he would like to give high school a try, and Rebecca thinks she wants to just go straight to community college as soon as they'll let her in. I will support whatever decision they make. I'll try to keep Our Homeschool Mystery updated from time to time, but the posts won't appear as frequently, as we move on to other interests. After being asked over and over again about the how and where of our hikes, I am in the process of launching a new blog, Our Hiking Mystery. Stay tuned for all our hiking secrets revealed! Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!

"Changing Education Paradigms"

 Just thinking about some of our homeschool plans for this week which include building gingerbread houses and baking cookies! We aren't getting much "school" (in the traditional sense) done during the holidays, but we are tapping into our creative sides. So this morning I am considering the value of creativity in all aspects of life, and how I can continue to nurture that in my children. I was reminded of a great video by Sir Ken Robinson where he states that creativity is, "Original ideas that have value," and "Divergent thinking isn't a synonym but is an essential capacity for creativity." Here is the video with help from RSA Animate and YouTube. I'm also including him in our blog's "Links We Like" section. His website has the rest of the hour-long talk on the subject.

Disspelling the Doubts of Homeschooling

This month, I decided to google search for some topics for a post. One of the most popular topics I found was about how bad homeschooling is. So, I thought I'd dispel some of these doubts about homeschooling.

1) The first anti-homeschool result I found was from http://www.ehow.com/list_6603210_reasons-against-home-schooling.html. It said, "It is difficult to understand how a parent or parents can provide their children with the same level of academic opportunity as an entire staff of trained professionals. They must depend upon a self-planned curriculum or those they have found elsewhere. Each curriculum varies widely in efficacy and can lead to different levels of learning. A school setting offers specialists in each field, including music, art and speech. As bright and dedicated as a home educator might be, he/she simply cannot fill all of those roles." You don't need a curriculum to teach. We actually only have two curriculum we use, one of which we use rarely. The rest is just things like writing blog posts, or taking music lessons. No one person is filling in all the roles. Many people are filling in all the roles.

2) Another search result took me to a site called http://teacherrevised.org/2009/05/30/the-case-against-homeschooling/ Number seven on the list said, "God hates homeschooling. From my side, to take your faithful children out of schools is to miss an opportunity to spread the grace, power and beauty of the Lord." Theoretically Jesus was homeschooled. At the time Rome didn't have free schools, and you can't say a guy who was born in a hay trough was rich. So who schooled him? Exactly, his parents.

3) The next site I found was a site called http://www.educateexpert.com/argumentsagainsthomeschooling.html. My favorite argument from this site is the third argument. It says, "You need to think about when it comes to the arguments against home schooling is the distraction factor. If a child is schooled at home, the result can be that the child does not take their studies seriously, especially when a parent is their teacher. This behavior could thus result in poor grades." True they could be distracted, but that doesn't mean they'll get bad grades. Even as I write this post, Rebecca's computer is playing the annoying, almost jazzy music that comes with her Kitty Care video game. I think that's distraction enough. Yet I still write this blog post, and the last thing I'm thinking about is watching her play her game. It is still possible to work at home without distraction, you just need to know how to avoid being distracted. Don't adults get distracted at their jobs, too, and have to learn how to deal with it?

4) The next anti-homeschooling thing I found was the third or fourth comment on http://www.pjnet.com.my/ftopict-3660-.html. It said, "I personally dislike homeschooling because it deprives the children from interacting with other kids their age. This does limit their social skills." I think people against homeschooling take the term to literally. They think that we only school at home. However, I honestly think we school more away from home than we do at home. With the many field trips and events between our two homeschool groups we really only homeschool at home on Thursdays, some Fridays, and Saturdays. That's four out of seven days that we are interacting with other homeschoolers. So, socialization isn't a problem.

If this blog post didn't dispel some of the doubts about homeschooling I don't know what will.

Massacre Grounds

Thanksgiving Tuesday is coming to a close here at our house, and we'll be working on turkey leftovers for the rest of the week. We celebrated early due to the homeschooling parents' crazy work schedules, but the good news is that both Mom and Dad will be off for Christmas this year for the first time in three years. Woohoo!

While the turkey was in the oven, we took a short hike to the Massacre Grounds along the northwestern slope of the Superstition Mountains off of First Water Trailhead. The Tonto Forest Rangers have closed the dirt access road to the Massacre Grounds, but the trail can still be reached by parking in the Crosscut Trailhead parking area, and heading southeast along the dirt trail following the many rock cairns. Here are a few shots of the ones I photographed along the way. We all thought this was a cool way to keep track of a pretty unused trail. We never saw a soul the whole afternoon. The entire trail with the new trail access is about 5 miles round trip with approximately a 1000 foot elevation gain with great views. We could see Four Peaks and even the Phoenix skyline distantly to the far west.

The Massacre Grounds take its name from the alleged massacre of the Peralta mining family by the Apaches around 1848 because the Apaches held this part of the Superstitions as a sacred place of the "Thunder God," and the Peralta family continued to mine there and transport the gold back to their home in Sonora, Mexico. There are many different versions of the story, but it is thought that after the massacre, the Apaches dumped all of the Peralta gold in this area, and subsequent miners have attempted to locate it here. As with all of our Tuesday trips, we try to make it as educational as possible, and we frequently remind the kids, "Hey, you could be in school right now," but they really liked this trip to the Massacre Grounds on Turkey Day because of the relation to the massacre of  "Alfred the Turkey" (I don't know why they started naming the turkeys -- we buy them wrapped in the grocery store just like most people do.) Anyway, Happy Turkey Massacre Day, for those of you that have not yet celebrated! Hope you, too, can enjoy a nice Thanksgiving hike!

Being Weird

"But homeschooled kids are just weird!" 

(sigh)

No, we've never heard that before! 

(aahhh... the smell of sarcasm)

As we're sort of starting to wrap up our year-long project-blog of providing just a little window into "our homeschool mystery," I'm considering topics that I haven't yet hit on. I know our tag cloud is fairly long, but I wanted the kids to see some of what they have accomplished in one year, and I also wanted readers interested in certain topics to be able to find them. The tags increase in size as we return to those subjects, and I see that "socialization" is nice and big! If you click on the socialization tag, you will see all the times we have referenced the socialization process when writing about our homeschool journey. I enjoy reading them all back to back since I like stories about times with our friends.

So I find that even if I'm able to convince the doubters that homeschooled kids are, in fact, plenty socialized, I still get the, "but they're weird" response. So I officially give up! That's right, for those of you that know me, miracle of miracles, I'm not going to argue this one! I do believe that homeschoolers eat, sleep, and breathe just like everyone else in this world, but I will accept the "weird" title. If being weird means that we make our own paths and don't follow the crowd, then I'll take it! There's no coincidence that I'm timing this blog post with Halloween, a holiday that I've always enjoyed. To me, there's something so fun about dressing up and being silly and weird for a night. It's the only night of the year that we "get to try on something new" for a change, and it's accepted by most of society. I think it would be nice if we could embrace that philosophy the rest of the year.

I have three favorite blog articles on the subject of homeschoolers "being weird." The first is "The Weird Homeschool Girl Goes to School" by Tammy Takahashi where she points out the irony that if schooled kids are so accepting of people who are different, then how come they don't help the weird kid at school?
Here's a link: http://www.justenoughblog.com/?p=1468

I also like her article, "School Pot Calling Homeschool Kettle Black -- Acceptance is not taught in school" which has one of my favorite quotes, "School is not better simply because you went to school." As someone who also went to school, can I please be spared of one more person telling me, "Look, I went to school, and I turned out fine." Yes, I get it -- it's possible. I'm only trying to present that homeschooling is also a viable option for turning out "fine."
Here's a link: http://www.justenoughblog.com/?p=1735

The last article is from the blog, Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers, and the post, "Why Are Homeschoolers So Weird and Unsocialized?" attempts to define what it means to be "weird," followed by one of  my favorite poems by Robert Frost. I also encourage you to read the comments after the post so you can get an idea of the kinds of things people say to homeschoolers all the time. Do parents of schooled kids endure this much hostility towards their decision to send their kids to school?
Here is the link: http://www.weirdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com/2008/08/why-are-homeschoolers-so-weird-and.html