License To Love

Blog Writing Course

Not that we don't have an excess of blogs out there, but I have revised my previously snobbish viewpoint about blogging, which was this: blogs are a pointless display of internet preening that may people would be better off walking away from, and should choose instead to invest their time in a good bible study, or perhaps some space-saving, closet hydroponic vegetable gardening.

I now think blogging is like government education to the Democrats -- everyone should suffer under one, I mean, everyone deserves one, and even if you've never blogged before, you can and should give it a try. On the palest end of the spectrum, it's interesting, and at the darkest, deepest end, it can become a nearly life-sucking obsession, but you don't have to let it get that far.  Temperance is as much of a virtue as patience.

If you would like a blog, but don't know what the heck to do to get one started -- trust me -- there's more to it than just writing it -- you might want to take this blog writing course. This eight week course is a  hands-on, simple way to learn about blogging, and even the most dense of doofi can get a healthy little blog going in just a few short weeks, as well as learn the finer points of blog promotion and social networking. It also gives you a built-in group of peers who will read your stuff and help you feel like you are not writing in a vacuum.

I'm not advertising this course for personal gain.  I took it and it helped me.  Look what a blogger I am!

Guerrilla Homeschooling

If you are not careful, homeschoooling can be expensive.

It is easy to be lured by the latest piece of software that others are telling you will make a long-lasting difference in your child's education, the newest book that just happens to be on sale on Amazon.com or the "complete program" that will make your homeschooling life easier and prepare your child for an Ivy League college. Plus, that impressive homeschooling library looks so good when people come over.

Couple this with a common reduction in income -- most parents who stay home to homeschool are not generating a lot of income anyway-- and you can find your already tight purse strings stretched by a desire to buy much homeschooling " stuff." Be careful. Don't be a sheep.  It doesn't have to be this way.

Here is how to homeschooling the Guerrilla/Bare Bones way -- spending $100 or less per year per child.

What you need:

a library card
a way to get to the library
a sack to carry books home in
paper and pencils

Examples of how to do it:

Go to the library as often as you can. Check out books on whatever subjects interest you and your child. The library can also lend videos, music, books on tape, computer software, and even copies of art to hang on your walls for a time. Read books, ask lots of questions about what your child read.

Use the internet to look up a Freecycle group in your area and use Freecycle for school supplies, old electronics to take apart, and materials for crafts and projects. You could also go to Amblesideonline and use their entirely free curriculum, including copies of e-texts to supplement your homeschooling, or give you a guide to follow if you feel that you need a guide.

Check out books on birdwatching and then go watch birds.  Let your child draw pictures of the birds he sees, labeling the anatomy. Use this to fuel a study on anatomy, or ornithology, exploring it as far as your child is willing to go.  If he likes art, draw the birds in detail.  Let him draw many, then have relatives over for an art show.

Get as involved as the child wants to get with every subject he shows an interest in.  Often subjects act like springboards for other subjects.

Go to free concerts, free cultural events, and and free community lessons. You can often barter services for tuition for a local class. Ask local theater groups if you and your child can see a dress rehearsal for free in exchange for a written review. Although a review written by a child is likely to be worthless to a theater company, they will often support a child's interest in theater and say yes. Have the child write the review, and then send it  along with a thank you note to the theater company.

If your child is interested in computers, dig some out of people's trash.  Let the child take the computers apart. Support him putting them back together again. Get books from the library on computer hardware and design and go through them together. Use the internet together, letting the child research topics he is interested in. If he likes writing, let him start a free blog.

If your child is interested in gardening and plants, ask people whose plants you admire for clippings and old plastic pots.  You can create a beautiful hobby that enhances the home and opens up a portal to the study of biology with just a few clippings.

Cook together.  You have to cook anyway, so why not teach your child?

Even long after the child can read well to himself for entertainment, read aloud to him.  Pick books that are just out of his "reading reach" and give him the gift of literature and your time.  Encourage him to draw, build models, legos, or do another hobby while you read.

Then, take the money you didn't spend on textbooks and workbooks and pay your rent, start a college fund, save for some land, or travel together. 

What matters to his education isn't the money you spend, but the  love, interest, and intellectual support you provide.  Being available emotionally, intellectually, and physically are worth more than the most expensive private school tuition.

Public School Saga: Inquisitions, Violence and Pedophilia, Partie Deux

How bad could a middle school two blocks from our house be? It's a nice neighborhood. I know some of the parents who send their kids there. Things that don't jibe: the school is on a tree-lined street in a desirable neighborhood, in one of the best towns the #$%#$% County Public School system occupies. People lie and break laws to get their kids to go there. I agreed to send my daughters, who are nice, good kids, there. The parents I know who send their kids there are nice parents and some of their kids are nice, good kids.

I have seen two students and one teacher be led out of the school in handcuffs this year. My daughters have told me stories about school fights that would have made somebody money if they were caught on camera -- earring-ripping, bottles-smashing, dirt-lying, rib-kicking brawls. And these are just the girls.

My daughters so regularly tell me about being hollered at for misunderstandings that did not even involve them, that they think it is normal to be spoken to that way.

       Act 1:           My sixth grader, who is one of the kindest soul who walks the planet, is soft-spoken, good to the core, and desires peace, calm and order in her daily life. She happens to have a bladder the size of a six ounce juice container. That means that when she drinks six ounces of juice, and she says she need to go to the bathroom a short time later, she really needs to go. She's not lying. She needs to release her bladder. Not on the floor in the hallway, or on somebody's science fair project, as is assumed by school personnel.  She is not trying to slip off campus, leave class to sell drugs, nor does she have intentions of defacing school property. She just wants to urinate in the toilet and go back to class.

She has been denied the opportunity to use the bathroom in school, often all day. She has been forced to have a male security guard escort her to the toilet, and wait outside of the bathroom and escort her back to class. Yes we called the principal (remember "Wilson?"), and after a few weeks, had a meeting. We were told that the children are allowed to use the bathroom if needed.

My daughter had no luck. Being a problem solver, she tried another tactic. She raced to a class in one minute, and asked the teacher if she could quickly go to the bathroom. The teacher said that she could, but she would be marked tardy if she came back late. My daughter weighed her options: pee on the floor in front of her peers, or use the toilet and risk being marked tardy. The child race walked to the bathroom, used it, and race walked back to find that the door was locked and she was on the wrong side of it. She motioned to the teacher through the tall rectangle of glass in the door, a sort of shrugging" what's up?" motion, and the teacher pointed to the office and screamed "Detention! You've got detention for being late. Get to the office!"

Nobody expects the #%#$% County School System!

Our chief weapon is surprise....surprise and fear....fear and surprise!

         Act 2:        My eighth grader is classified as "highly gifted." That term, although not worth a lot to me, is like a golden ticket in the @#$%@#$% County Public School System. She gets to take special classes, which as far as I can tell, aren't really special, because they are just as continually interrupted by "read-ins" * and state testing preparation as the other classes, but they are staffed by a few cream-of-the-crop teachers, which almost makes it all worth it.

This child became interested in the Law Studies class, and once in, became enamored of Mock Trial competition. The teacher who taught the class and ran the club, was also the school soccer coach. He was a frenetic, scattered, possibly narcissistic man, and judging from things he said about himself, likely not successful in former careers. My daughter had played soccer for him the previous year, and her radar had remained up from dealing with him as a coach.

The girl and I had a talk. Not only did she agree to not be alone with him, she had decided on her own that that would be a good idea. She also decided on her own to take whatever he said with a grain of salt, as he was proving himself to be of poor character to her. The things he said didn't match the things he did. He often promised the girls candy bars, parties, dinners out and never came through, thank goodness. Before the start of an exam, the teacher placed a photo of himself on my daughter's desk and said, "For inspiration." He gave gifts of hats and t-shirts to other girls.

In December of 2007, my daughter's good friend and three other chums were grading papers for this teacher. One of them flipped over a page and found a photograph of the teacher's wife that was so anatomically revealing the kids could have probably see her cervix if they had known where to look. There followed much more proof of the differences between boys and girls, the teacher's fidelity to his wife, his wife's fitness level and her real hair color. The children, who had been grading papers for a Law class, were given a brief seminar in anatomy and physiology, or possibly art photography criticism, whereby they were able to discern things they didn't need to know people had -- scrotal hair, leather fetishes, positional preferences, and more.

My daughter, thankfully, did not see these photographs. In my perfect world, once the children had taken the photographs to a trusted teacher, which they did, the teacher would have reported them, which she did, and the man would have been removed from the company of all children immediately, by having his position suspended. This did not happen. It took over a month for the man to be removed from school, despite the fact that the entire school heard about the photographs by lunch time, and recreations of the photos, in pen and ink, by the more artistically talented students,  were circulating before the end of the school day.

Was the teacher a sicko who planted the photos on purpose, or was he just a roob who made a career-ending mistake? We, the parents of @#$%@#$% School in Q@$%$ County, will never know, because the administration never called, us, wrote a letter, or answered any of a number of our phone calls.

What they did do was to interrupt their forced viewing of An Inconvenient Truth, and call them into a room with an order to write down all the strange things this teacher had ever done. They were told this was anonymous, and to speak freely. Then when they handed their papers in, they were told to sign the m My daughter, who questioned this, but who did not have the confidence to refuse to sign the paper, was told that the teacher would never see the papers and everything she wrote would be safe.

The next day at school, the teacher was there in a nasty mood. He made snide comments about having to watch what he said around the children.  MY daughter was later told by another teacher that the man had read their "confessions."

In a "postal" climate, where anyone can snap and shoot up a place, and this possibly unstable teacher had access to his students' addresses, taking this kind of action, or taking any action at all aside from immediately removing the man from school, was unwise.

About a month after making phone calls to the school and being told to "take it up with the county", our girls were interviewed one on one with a psychologist, without permission from the parents.  My daughter called out of class and asked, among other questions, if she had done any role-playing with the teacher in the closet.

My daughter, at age 14 now knows about sexual role-playing, as I got to explain it to her that night when she came home with questions. She really, really didn't need to know this at her age. The child has a naturally twisted sense of humor, and "role playing in the closet" often comes up as a suggestion to a punishment, or an event that happened at school. This is not a preferred state of enlightenment, but it is a good thing my kid can roll with it.

NOBODY expects the #$%@$%^ County Public School System!
Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise....
Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency....
Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to ourselves!

She'll be rolling with it at private school next year.

* a read in- is a school-wide exercise that forces children to read the captions on low-quality Disney sit-coms, instead of allowing them to read actual literature chosen by the children. My daughter has been yelled at and forced to put down Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetze in order to read the captions for an episode of That's So Raven.

Public School Saga: Inquisitions, Violence and Pedophilia, Partie Une

Our local public school system has disappointed me. In baser terms: it blows.

It one of the largest public school systems in the nation. I understand that patience and calm communication are necessary when dealing with any large government organization. I understand that we, as a people, have lowered our standards of expectations when it comes to communicating with large entities, and have resigned ourselves to being satisfied with an LCD of a few simple actions -- a return phone call, a denial letter which may possibly be appealed, and perhaps a gentle-voiced cog who says, "I'll see what I can do," and actually cares enough to try something, anything, and gets back to you on it.

But the @#%@#$%^ County Public School system has become ill during its evolution into the scary Japanese movie monster that it is, and has grown into an entity that defies rationale. It has become an angry, stupid machine. In fact, even a brief experience with it lets a body understand deus ex machina in real life, although though there never seems to be a resolution, ever, of any problem encountered.

Hearken: if you want a child to be educated according to theories and methods originating from a blend of The Matrix, Monty Python and a B.F. Skinner laboratory, I urge you to move to @#%@#$% and enroll them in @%^#%^& County Public Schools.

A student's experiences may include, but not be limited to: being locked out of his classroom for going to the toilet with permission, holding his urine or worse for seven hours because he is not allowed to use the toilet, being yelled at so close up, and so loudly by teachers that a student could identify his teacher in a tonsil line-up, being physically assaulted and psychologically bullied by other students without administrative intervention, missing a midterm because he is told to go take another midterm, then being called a liar for missing the first midterm, and receive an F on his report card, and turning over a stack of student papers to find such graphic porno pictures planted by a teacher, of the teacher and his wife that it is impossible to tell if the camera used had 4 gigapixels or was a medical camera with dermatological magnifications.

A parent's experience may include but not be limited to such support as: being locked out of a student's holiday recital for being five minutes late, being subject to a consistent execution of passing the buck so many times that by the time the parent actually gives up on communicating, involving his children in witch hunts and interviews with psychologists without parental consent, being subject to a constant assumption that his children are bad and wrong, or have lied about or are currently lying about something, and engaging in a phone tag volley so one-sided that he may begin calling the principal's secretary "Wilson."

I suppose I can say I am grateful -- these actual experiences were spread out among my three children, or I might have slashed somebody's tires by now, but they have all occurred within a seven month period of one school year.

I have a son with autism. He is beautiful. He is handsome. His smile is so bright he makes people do double takes. He does not have a walker, a striped cane, an obvious physical disability, or a shred of deceit in his mind. He spends his school days with a permanent "kick me" sign on his back, due to his odd speech, awkward gait, and inability to read social cues, faces, tones of voice, or other things that help people navigate the social world. He also has learning disabilities and significant language processing problems. What he wants most in the world besides meeting Shaq, is to have a friend.

During school, he has been hit, kicked, punched ( in the face and chest), tripped at, called "gay", "faggot", "@#$%ing #$$hole", "idiot," and worse. He has been set up by kids, being invited to their houses, usually in front of a group, and when he bites the bait, the kid will say, "Good. You can come over and I can dress you in a dress and paint your nails. Faggot."

He and I have also been told that he is lying when the bullies capitalize on my son's inability to be discreet, or plan ahead, or protect himself, and race back to their seats by the time my son can stop what he is doing and get to the teacher. He has also been punished by the teacher for tattling and has been called a "snitch."  To reveal how painful and life-affecting Asperger's Syndrome can be, my son still doesn't understand how wrong this is and calls these wretched children his friends.

I regularly get notes home about how my son is having a hard time "paying attention" and have recently received a letter saying he is failing third grade. Yes, I said "third grade." This is all occurring among children ages 8 to 11. A few of the bullies have been retained long enough for them to have begun puberty, yet they are attending third grade for the third time, sitting every day, with their sprouting arm pit hair, next to eight year-old girls with pig tails and Dora the Explorer panties.

Through omission, the teacher and administration have allowed this treatment of my son to escalate into a class sport. It often involves many children -- not only the bullies, but the children who witness and don't tell, and the children who stand around and point and laugh.

What I have done: written letters to the teacher and the autism coach, requested meetings to address the bullying, offered books and articles on bullying in the classroom, contacted the principal for a meeting, refused to let my son attend class until something was done about the bullying, and finally, left a series of messages for the school resource deputy (SRD) -- the local police officer assigned to the elementary school. I was at the point where I wanted somebody arrested for assault.

We have had a few meetings, I was assured that the school has a "strong" anti-bullying policy in place. I met with the vice principal who was sympathetic, kind, and took action by giving three of the worst offenders a few days in an off-campus detention, presumably one for "bad boys." One of the worst of the four was transferred to another class. That helped a little. But my son is now failing school.

This is our third attempt at two different government schools. We will not be attending public school next year.  I don't care if I have to sell plasma or one of my daughters to make sure this happens. I'm just kidding -- the daughters have already been through enough at their own #$%@#$% County Public School ( see "The Inquisition, What a Show!).