Not Another Homeschool Blog

Here is this weeks Carnival of Homeschooling http://taytayhser.blogspot.com/2014/11/carnival-of-homeschooling-464th-edition.html

My kids are home and I am thankful. There are more dishes, and I have done a lot of laundry (I know they can do it themselves, but I didn't want my laundry room taken hostage for their entire visits).  I have cooked a bit, and I have driven a bit, but they add a great kind of energy to my home. That is all I am thankful for though. I am mostly sad. Bill Cosby. Fergussen. Comments sections. Politics in general. I am very disappointed America. After the break, I am going to start doing one piece of artwork each week.  The daily sketches were more to get me warmed up and to work on some techniques.  Sketchbooks can have some very bad days, and some very good days.  You have seen both. From now on I will be showing a piece that I have conceived, sketched, developed, and completed.  One a week.  Please help me stay motivated! I am including some of my favorite pieces from my sketch a day series.

sketch a day #27 - 10 minutes Ruby Dee, Maya Angelou, Elaine Stritch, Casey Kasem, Robin Williams, Geoffrey Holder Joan Rivers, Oscar de la Renta, and many, many other deeply talented people died this year.  Mike Nichols, who died this last night influenced the last Seven decades of televisions and movies. His death had me thinking... who are we replacing these people with? Kim K. West? Miley Cyrus? Justin Beiber?  Basically, we are replacing these talented, talented, icons with people who are just as infamous as they are famous. The media is more full of narcisists, and dysfunctional stars than talented ones. Sure each has something about them that makes people swoon, and some even have staying power, but they attract more idolatry and admiration. That is a problem. As an artistic person, and as a parent of artistic people, I feel like my parents generation did us a disservice that we have to reverse. I distinctly remember my parents telling 13 year old me that black ...

Sketch a day # 26  - 10 min  What set of homeschool siblings are probably the most famous and least understood?  No. Not the Duggar kids.  It is the Smiths.  Jaden and Willow Smith, children of Will and Jada. I'm not even sure they consider themselves homeschoolers, they went to school for a year after being officially homeschooled, and now they are lifelong learners.  According to Jaden, " School is not authentic because it ends. It’s not true, it’s not real. Our learning will never end. The school that we go to every single morning, we will continue to go to."  Since they are still minors and bound by education laws in their state, I consider that homeschooling.  So people are weirding out because these famous and talented (some might disagree) children gave an interview and spoke about subjects that is not typical of children.  Gawker magazine tweeted "Every single thing about this Jaden and Willow Smith interview is nuts". ...

Sketch a day #25 - 10 minutes.  This took about 10 minutes.  I plan to revisit this subject Viola Davis in a week or so when I got from doing a sketch a day to a full fledged finished piece a week.  She is a great actress and inspires me to be creative.

Homeschooling will not make your family happy. Having a happy family will make your family happy. I realize this is a simplistic statement, but it must be said, especially in light of all of the negative media surrounding homeschooling these days. There are some young adults out there with an axe to grind where homeschooling is concerned.  Many of them have every right to be disgruntled because their parents... and therefor their homeschool experience sucked. So, I was reading a post today about "the homeschool myth", where the writer says that they blame homeschooling for their less than stellar upbringing because "homeschooling made that $hit (the bad stuff that happened) seem natural. That because they did not have access to people outside the home... ever... that they didn't know that this kind of abuse was not normal. Furthermore, her abuse was intensified because her mother was egged on by other homeschoolers who counseled her on making her child less reb...

Sketch a day #23 - 1 hr. Pen and ink So clearly our society is obsessed with the size of people's butts.  Whether, you are all about that bass- no treble , or think silicone butts are Ew- EW .  They are everywhere!  And let's not talk about Kim K West's (no I'm not linking to it) latest magazine pics. The bigger the butt the better. Pop culture has conversations about butts locked down.  So why-oh-why does Mecklenburg County NC have questions about butt size on exams used throughout the county ?  Seriously.  Ew. Here's my problem with the question:   "LaShamanda ( Who ??? Lashamanda isn't a real name.  One can only assume that they were going for a stereotypically black name.  If you google Lashamanda, you will not find it has ever been used before.  Lashanda, or Shamanda would have been more appropriate.  Instead they chose to mock black names with this made up farce) has a heterozygous big bootie,  ( What ? ...