The Boss'

Photographic evidence of our current activities.

I’ve installed the work surfaces and end panels in the office. I’m pretty happy with the way things look so far. There will be a whole wall of storage above where Benny is working in the photo above. Notice how the work surface in notched around window on the north wall. I like that little detail. I’ve spent some time working in it, and I must say that I really like being able to glance out the window every now and then. In the summer, with the window open, it will feel like I’m working out doors.

In other news, Ben is digging an enormous hole. Yeah, and, well…that’s pretty much it. It’s a huge hole, under a gigantic pine tree next to our garage. I’m hoping that the hole doesn’t destabilize the tree and cause it to fall on the house and kill us all as we sleep. Emma, Grace, and Anna have also joined in the fun and taken turns digging. The neighbor kids have also put in some serious time in the pit. Amazing what can be accomplished with child labor.

Our four kittens are growing like mad. We were worried about Brownie (mom) at first, but she’s really getting the hang of it. The kittens are starting to play really rough. Brownie puts up with it for the most part, climbing into the box to feed them, and bailing out when they get a little too wild.

Emma also played nurse to 7 baby bunnies, but only for a few days. It was a couple of weeks ago, on a Friday, and Benny came tearing up to me with a bucket in his hands. He was screaming, “Look what I’ve got! You’re going to FREAK OUT!” That’s a sign that something very strange is about to happen. In the fraction of a second that it took him to approach me, I mentally prepared myself to be shown anything from a human head to a fossilized turd.  The actual contents of the bucket were much less disturbing than I had imagined. Apparently the kids were helping the neighbors pull ground cover to reclaim their sandbox, and a bunny was discovered. By the time Benny showed me the bunny, the rest of the kids were hot on his heels declaring that they had found six more. That was pretty much the end of Ben’s involvement with the bunnies. It fell to Emma to care for the critters. She took it as a challenge and did all she could, but they died off one by one. She buried each one by the side of the barn, marking each grave with a little flower. At one point she came to me with one of the lifeless creatures in her hand, and said, “Daddy, is this one dead?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It looks pretty dead.”

“Can you tell if it’s breathing?” she asked.

I felt the little fur ball, wondering where in the world one would check for a pulse on a baby bunny. I considered the animal for what seemed like a respectful amount of time before I pronounced my judgement.

“I don’t feel a pulse honey, I think he’s gone.”

“Guess I’ll go bury another one,” she said.

The Holland Sentinel today ran an article about a bill before the legislature that would require home schoolers to register with their school district. As a home schooler, I am not a fan of the bill. I left a comment over at the Holland Sentinel…here’s the text of it.

Registration of home schooled children, by itself, is not objectionable. But, it begs the question, "What good is registration alone?" Imagine that in a school district, 1,000 children are home schooled. Okay, lets have those parents register the kids as being home schooled.

Now what?

Do you really think that the school district is going to say, "Hmm, 1,000 kids being home schooled…that represents about $800,000 dollars in per pupil funding…oh, well, best of luck home schoolers…let us know if you need anything!"

No. What the state wants, is control. Registration, regulation, etc. are all just attempts to control what parents teach their kids. The folks proposing registration are well intentioned…they want to make sure nobody is getting left behind, but that just raises more questions.

The comment above by You can is a perfect example of the sorts of issues that will arise…
"If a home-schooling parent is doing everything they are supposed to be doing why would they be fearful of having the public schools make sure things are on track?"

First, define what you mean by "…doing everything they are supposed to be doing…" So, if I spend the majority of each day teaching my 8 year old son to be a blacksmith, am I doing "everything I’m supposed to be doing"? No? Why not? Sure, he may be behind in some subjects compared to his factory schooled peers, but I’m teaching him to be a blacksmith. Check out these horse shoes! Your question betrays your underlying assumption that there exists some static curriculum that every child must learn, and that everyone agrees on what that curriculum contains. It leaves no room for diversity.

And how do you propose to have the "public schools make sure things are on track?" Would you like them to take a MEAP test? I’ve done a lot of research on the subject, so I’ve delayed doing formal math with my kids, is that okay with you? They may do lousy on the math section of a MEAP test…will you look at that result and shrug your shoulders and say, "Carry on. We’re just checking in." Obviously not. The state will not be an impartial observer…the state wants to insert itself into the process because, fundamentally, the state believes that children belong first to "IT", and then to the parents.

On a side note, any comment referring to home schoolers as attempting to "shelter" their children from the "real world" is laughable. We who home school are sheltering our children, but it’s not from the real world. The real world is not found inside a classroom. In fact, nothing could be more artificial than a group of same age peers being grouped together, regardless of interest or ability, and being given the same lesson to work on for a completely random period of time. At no other point in your life are you likely to encounter such a set of circumstances.

Maybe registration proponents want my name and address so they can send me a check next September to help offset the cost of teaching my own. Unlikely. Even if that were the case, you can be sure that that check would come with some serious strings attached.

There wasn’t a whole lot of activity on the site, as far as comments were concerned, but I felt like someone needed to respond to "You can…" When I said at the beginning of my comment that registration, by itself, is not objectionable, I did not mean that I would ever be in favor of registration. I was attempting to highlight the uselessness of registration alone. It would be of no value to the state, without some sort of regulatory component, and there would certainly be no upside for the home schooling families.

Here’s a progress report on the work that we’ve been doing in the boys room. Although our latest picture doesn’t show it, we have both boys in the room now, with Ben’s bed over where the light is standing in the bottom photo. By today’s standards, having your kids sleeping in such close proximity is probably considered child abuse, but they both seem to be doing pretty well so far. Ben has not complained about Jack keeping him awake. Ironically, tonight we put Ben to bed upstairs, on the floor of the playroom, because Jack was really having a hard time going to sleep. It may be a result of the three shots he had yesterday at his six month check up. He’s tipping the scales at a whopping 18 pounds. To give you some perspective, Emma weighed 18 pounds at one year.

We’d like to add a rug to the boys room to cut down on noise, and Ben wants his bed hung up on the wall, like he had it in our last house. I hate to do that to my nice new paint job, but it is a pretty good use of space, so that is also on my list of things to do.

Progress is also being made in the office, and I’ll post some pictures of that soon. Trim is in and painted, and I’ve got two coats of sealer on the work surfaces. I hope to install them this weekend.

We’ll see how things work out. I’m very anxious to get the office put back together. I have a makeshift work space in our front room, which is intended to be the kid’s “school” room. It’s cozy to say the least.

Imagine a world where two children, of the same age, have very different educational experiences. I would argue that in a perfect world, every child would have a different educational experience. Not according to Jack Lessenberry. His essay today on Michigan Public Radio neatly encapsulates nearly every home schooling stereotype into one concise piece of nonsense. Here’s a link, and here’s the comment I left on his site…

Wow…just…wow. That was probably the most uninformed, one-sided, hack job that I’ve ever heard on home education. I’d love to hear some of Jack’s ideas for “firmly regulating” home schooling. Prescribing a curriculum? That would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it? Let me guess, if the state comes up with a curriculum for me to teach to my children, it’s probably going to bear some resemblance to the same curriculum taught in the local public school, right? Why endure the tremendous stress and financial hardship of home schooling if I wanted to feed them the same old stuff that they can get for “free” at school?

And Jack, good luck fixing our broken public schools. I’d argue that they are functioning exactly as designed, as a reaction to the industrial revolution. The demand for “human resources” is what gave rise to the factory model of education, and comments like yours just betray the fact that you’ve swallowed that philosophy hook, line, and sinker. Common sense tells us that the tutorial model of education is vastly more effective than the factory model. Even when being taught by an uncertified teacher. (Hard to imagine, I know…teacher certification has led to such spectacular results thus far.)

You say,

“More and more, we are evolving into a place where two kids the same age have wildly different educational experiences.”

Imagine that! Two kids, the same age, being taught different things! Having different educational experiences. Someone call social services. But seriously, did you read that back to see how it sounded? Maybe, in a follow up essay, you can describe the one “right” education experience.

I’ll admit, when I started home schooling my kids, I was just hoping that I wouldn’t screw up; that they’d turn out normal, just like other kids. But, the more I learn about home schooling, the more I see that “normal” is the last thing I want for my kids. Normal is so lame. We can do so much better.

I’ve written too much already, because I know this is falling on deaf ears, but the scary thing is that you will be taken seriously by the majority of your listeners. My advice is to leave home schoolers alone…after all, we’ll need creative, independent, morally upstanding leaders to solve the educational crisis in this state/country.

Regards,

Chad Boss

Being a pretty conservative bunch, and Mr. Lessenberry’s comments being aired on public radio, I’m not sure how many home schoolers heard it, but there were a few comments on the site by the time I had mine written, only a few minutes after it aired. I thought the other comments made good points as well, but Mr. Lessenberry chose not to address them, and instead pointed out a couple of spelling errors in one comment. Weak. Lessenberry intoned that the commenter’s spelling errors proved his point about parents being unqualified to teach their own. Yikes. I doubt Mr. Lessenberry can even imagine a world where government isn’t the solution to every problem. After hearing his essay, I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. Maybe a bit of both.

Saturday we were able to get the trim done in the office as part of the overall office remodel. Mostly it involved me staying out of the way while my brother-in-law did the hard stuff. I really like the way it turned out. Hopefully I’ll be able to find time this week to fill, sand, and paint it. Then work will begin on the work surfaces and shelves.

I’ve been playing with various layouts for our office/computer room. There have to be two separate work areas, one for me, and one for the rest of the family. I found it very useful to use SketchUp to model the space and potential workstations, but the most useful thing I did was to tape an outline of my proposed desk configuration onto the floor. I used blue painters tape to mock up a design that I really liked when I created it in SketchUp, but the real world layout exercise highlighted a few key problems. The layout I had designed using a peninsula for the kids workstation wouldn’t leave enough room for us to sit back to back. It wasn’t until I had the tape on the floor and my office chair and two folding chairs for the kids that I could really get a sense of the space. As you can see in the picture above, I was able to download a model of a Dell 24" monitor to get a feel for the amount of work surface that the LCD’s will require. I’m pretty pleased with the layout as it stands now, but it remains to be seen whether or not I can build it.

Someone was even kind enough to make a SketchUp model of my Aeron chair.

Dust. We’re making lots of dust out on the farm lately. In the last couple of weeks we’ve undertaken a sort of impromptu remodeling project. Three small rooms on our main level were in serious need of an update. We are in the middle of refreshing the look of two of the rooms. One is going to be a bedroom for Jack and Ben, and the other will be an office/computer room. Between the two rooms is a bathroom that is completely torn apart, but we’re waiting to get into that because it’s a more major project. We’re not done yet, but here are some pics of the process.

(Boys room, before)

(Office, before)

(Painting the office, left, painting the boys room, right)

(The ugly carpet in both rooms was removed and the floors underneath were sanded and sealed.)