Not Another Homeschool Blog

So after I decompressed from homeschooling (vegetated for about a year), I gave a though to what I had liked and what I did not like about the activities I'd participated in as the kids grew up.  What I loved the most, was working on costumes, so I volunteered for a few local theatre and eventually, found one that would allow me to costume and learn at the same time.  That was just what I needed. A year later, and a few hundred costumes later, I was asked to join the board.  Hmmm... Ok.  Not easy, but important.  Cool. So that is where we are right now.  I love this place.  I love the people.  I love how we entertain, encourage, and include the community.  I want to help raise money for our little theatre, so we can be a big theatre and we can get more kids engaged, we can get more community members creating.  We can make more people like me more involved in the community. With that said, here is the link to my fundraising page. ...

Apparently, yes.  According to the Washington Post, " the reasons for black kids to be homeschooled may not be the same as for white kid s. (Ama Mazama's  research ) shows that black parents homeschool their children due to white racism." Problems include: Covert Institutionalized racism Eurocentric teachers' attitudes Racial stereotypes of black children Harsh school punishments As a former public school parent who is black and has black children, I can attest to many of these problems. We certainly experienced them.  The worst for us was the racial stereotypes of my family in general. When we moved to GA, for example, there weren't many black families in our kids school, and it was abundantly clear that the staff had ideas about black people and just assumed that those things were true about us.  I had people purchase my kids' field trip shirts because they assumed we could not. ( I'm pretty sure we made more than those folks.)  I had teac...

So how are they doing? They are OK, and maybe a bit too evolved for other people their age.  Seriously, they are doing just fine navigating the real world, but they are not necessarily in sync with their age mates around them.  And they are OK with that. And I am OK with that too. Let's see if I can explain. My 21 year old, seems very much like a normal 21 year old male.  He keeps his personal life close to his chest because that's "private".  He is very close to his family members, such as his sister and cousins, and honestly, that's how I get the 911 on my son.  But that thing that is most clearly apparent about him is that he doesn't have any patience for nonsense... by nonsense I mean bad behavior in general.  Rule breaking, lack of consideration, rudeness, meanness.  He lives on a college campus.  These things happen around him all the time.  He typically just avoids it and will not participate. My guess is that he was not desensit...

At this point in my homeschooling career, I am 3 years post homeschooling. My youngest child is well into the swing of her Jr. Year in college.  Someone recently asked me why I continue to blog about homeschooling and stay involved.  My answer was, because there are children that would fare better with an individual education. My days of slamming public schooling is long past. I have seen kids do poorly on both sides the argument and I have seen children on both sides do exceedingly well.  But whether people homeschool all the way through, or transition in or out of homeschooling, we need to respect and support each persons decisions.  This carnival of homeschooling features families that utilize or have utilized both homeschooling and traditional schooling.  With that said, Janine Cate writes  A Homeschooler Trying out a Private School  at Why Homeschool . In this post, the youngest daughter discusses her feelings about attending p...

Do I even need to say why? We could start with this suspension that just happened because a 12 year old boy was accused of staring at a young white girl.  The case makes me sick to my stomach because this same girl was able to dump milk in someone's lunch and get a way with it.  She sounds like a little tyrant, but a black boy "stares at her" and he gets suspension. No kid needs this! It is no secret that black boys are unevenly disciplined in school.  Let's look at my own son before we started homeschooling.  The kid sitting behind him who was not black was allowed to smack him in the back of his head all.day.long.  But, the second he spoke up or yelled at the boy, or touched the boy, he was threatened by the teacher.  I'm sorry, that's just crap. But if that's not enough for you, lets look at the facts as a whole.   By fourth grade many African American boys are already falling behind in the classroom.     This tells me that black boys...

Conversations that changed my outlook on life part 2: So there's this person who I have known pretty much all my life. Our relationship has always been tenuous. They are demanding. Their love language is gifts... for them... monetary. I don't love that way. So, needless to say, we butt heads. A lot.  But because of the nature of the relationship, I tried. Over and over. But the older I got, the more I became secure in saying NO. That caused problems.  After one particular NO. I was told, and I quote: "I hate you. I have always hated you. I will always hate you, and there is nothing you could ever do to change that." Believe it or not, that did not leave me devastated. It freed me.  In that moment, I understood that my actions would never, ever, ever, EEVVEEERRRRR earn me love. NO. Being who I am would earn me the love that was meant to come to me. So from that moment on, I felt a heavy weight lift from my spirit and I became more authentically my...

(little girl making big decisions) (I am stealing this from my Facebook page).  After writing it, it seemed really relative to my blog.   Conversations that changed my outlook on life... Part 1. When I was working a second job at a department store preparing to get married, I worked across the aisle from a woman on the other side of marriage. She had been married many, many years, and before her hubby could retire, he had become sick and she was his care-taker. She also had to work for the first time after having been a stay at home mom. Her kids used to come into the store to say hi. Her son was a doctor,  and her Daughter was a business woman, and she... She was bitter with regret that she had wasted her time raising her kids and taking care of her husband because look at where it landed her.     I think she told me these things because she knew I aspired to stay home and take care of my kids and husband and wanted me to escape her fate. She d...