Chandra Hoffman is Homeschooling This Fall

Yesterday the New York Times ran an article entitled Why I Am Homeschooling This Fall by Chandra Hoffman. First of all, most people could predict the type of comments a positive article about homeschooling would generate when published in the New York Times. The commenters did not disappoint; the insults to those that homeschool surfaced again and again.  So, I am going to assume this article was written in good faith – and is not merely a ploy to generate controversy - and offer Chandra my support.

Chandra,

I wish you much success in your homeschooling endeavor. As someone who has homeschooled her 14.5 year old since the beginning, I admire your enthusiasm; I thank God for mine. As for your travel plans, I believe that we can read about China and volcanoes all we want, but there is no substitute for seeing the real thing. I say this as a New Englander living on one income who has never taken her son west of the Mississippi.

To your naysayers:

When a superintendent in our area recently retired, he identified the Bible as the most important book of all. Christians, in the form of students, teachers and administrators are in our schools along with the liberals, conservatives, atheists, and so on.

If you think the homeschool community is a homogeneous group, then you have never homeschooled in New England.

Whenever a parent reads to their children or takes them to the zoo or helps them with their homework, they are homeschooling. When Michelle Obama took her daughter to Spain, she was not spitting in the eye of the unemployed; she was homeschooling. I hope you are not freaked out by that.

Somewhere in this country is a child spending her lunch break in the rest room, because the two friends she has amongst the thousand or so students that attend her high school do not share her lunch period. You can offer your child many opportunities to socialize but that does not mean he or she will become a social butterfly.

Somewhere in this country is a child who has no clue what his algebra teacher is talking about.

Somewhere in this country is an algebra teacher that would like to reach out to all her clueless students, but  there just is not enough time in a day.

Somewhere in this country is an algebra teacher that does not give a rat’s behind if his students understand the lesson of the day and that teacher has tenure.

I pray you never feel less qualified than the teacher that has labeled your child a failure.

There is no such thing as a perfect school, a perfect teacher, a perfect homeschool, a perfect parent, a perfect student or a perfect curriculum. We all must deal with these realities.

My success is your proof that smaller classes are needed.

I am not a liberal, a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat. The George Bushes and the Barack Obamas of this world do not care about the education of your child; they have one purpose - to keep the people of this country divided so that their party can be in power. The only person that truly cares about your child’s long term education is YOU!

Chandra, best of luck.  May your good days always outnumber your bad.

Carnival of Homeschooling

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Why Homeschool.  It is Why Homeschool's July 12 posting.

Helping with High School - A Regular Feature

During the middle school years, we did not use a calculator to do  math.  I had reviewed the pros and cons of using a calculator and had made the decision to hold off until we had learned to calculate percentages and to do long division manually.  I guess after making this decision life kicked in, because about a month into 9th grade, I picked up our algebra text and it said, “Using a graphing calculator…”  Oops!   Frantically, I began researching graphing calculators and this is what I learned:

Only some models are approved for use during the SAT, PSAT, ACT, AP and CLEP.   A good graphing calculator seems to cost about $100 so if you begin your research early, you might be able to save some money by finding a used model either on EBay or on sites such as used calculators  or sellcalculators.  Hundreds of Amazon.com customers have reviewed the Texas Instrument calculators, and I relied on many of these reviews  to make my decision.  We bought the TI-84 Plus – The Silver Edition which, as my husband says, seems to do everything but tie my son’s shoes.   If I could do it over again, I would buy the calculator earlier so 1) we could save a few bucks by shopping around; and 2) we could practice using it before we actually needed it.  Mathbits and Texas Instruments have tutorials that we found helpful.  

If an expensive graphing calculator isn’t in the budget or if you want to take more time to do your research, there are some free online graphing calculators. As an example, check out Coolmath.  Eventually, though, I would think you would want your child to learn graphing on the calculator that he or she can bring to the exams.  It is my understanding that laptops would not be allowed during an exam.

I found these articles at Classbrain and CollegeBoard helpful.

So, armed with our graphing calculator, a protractor, a compass, a straightedge and a ruler, we are ready for geometry -  I think.  If you know of something I have overlooked or have anything to add, I would appreciate hearing from you.

Signed,

a mathematically-challenged homeschooler that is flabbergasted she survived 1 A.M. algebra sessions and is even more astonished that she is actually looking forward to geometry.

Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."   Matthew 19:26 (NIV)

Carnival of Homeschooling

The current Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Roscommon Acres. 

Chalkboard Chatter

Sofa or Science?

This is my sofa. I bought it pre-husband at Roitman’s Furniture on Providence’s East Side almost twenty years ago. At the time, I liked its red and green plaid upholstery but, more importantly, it was sleek enough to fit down the cramped stairwell that led to my 3-room basement apartment. Roitman’s Furniture is long gone, but my sofa lives on. Now, though, in addition to its faded glory and torn upholstery, the wood underneath has given way, so if I sit on it too long, my back aches, and I need a helping hand to stand. As my sofa nears the end of its life, I think of how it is representative of what our homeschool is about.

In the early days of my sofa’s demise, my husband made certain the good side of each cushion showed when we were expecting company. (The good side meant the side with fewer holes.) Now, we don’t have good sides – just holes – and the smells escaping from this couch I’m pretty certain are beyond the help of Fabreze. Nevertheless, when company is due to arrive, my husband takes a large, gray beach towel and tucks it around the cushions to hide the more unsightly, larger holes. The towel, I estimate, remains in place for ten minutes.

Inevitably, about a month before we host a family holiday, we start thinking about replacing this well-worn piece of furniture, but then the task of actually shopping for a replacement is put on the back burner because there is a menu to plan, food to buy and a house to clean – not to mention math, history, science, etc. - and we do, after all, have the beach towel. Once the holiday is over, the urge to replace the couch subsides considerably along with those thoughts of “What will people think?”

The last time we thought about buying a new sofa, I spent 2 hours online researching upholstery which would survive cat claws. After all that research, I was too exhausted to shop and as one online commenter put it, “You can have a cat or you can have nice furniture. You cannot have both.” I agreed so I moved on to other things.

As our couch became more and more tattered over the years, we considered entering it into the “Worldwide Ugly Couch Contest” or in similar contests sponsored by various local furniture companies. In some of these contests, however, ugly does not necessarily mean a couch with fabric full of holes; it means - to put it plainly - butt-ugly. Our couch does not qualify, but you may feel differently.

As an aside, when my husband and I were married, he had a couch that would have competed nicely in such a contest, but, sadly, we gave it away before we realized such contests existed. (Note: my husband likes to tell everyone that when we merged my apartment with his house, it was only his stuff that went elsewhere, but this is simply not true.)

Recently, my parents, in the process of downsizing from a house to a condo, offered us their old sofa which, of course, looked brand new to us. We immediately accepted. This couch, however, did not replace our old sofa. Instead, we put my parent’s couch in a room which has been void of furniture since we moved into our home four years ago. So, our old sofa is still with us, and it gets as much use now as did it before we got our “new” couch, mainly because it is in the same room as the X-box, the hi-def TV and the computer, and also, because we’re allowed to eat and drink anything while sitting on it without the woman of the house – that would be me - freaking out.

Every parent knows what it is that makes them a homeschooler. Perhaps you know you are a homeschooler because you look forward to reading those 20 books that your kids just put in the library book bag, or because you enjoy coaching your daughter’s soccer team or because you are excited at the thought of preparing a lesson for the 15 children that form your child’s homeschool co-op, boy scout troop or Sunday school class. You know, too, what is placed on the back burner while you read, coach or teach. I believe my sofa is symbolic of the fact that, currently, I would much rather spend my time planning for science than on any effort to replace this sofa. Given this, perhaps my sofa should be near the front door of our homeschool for all to see rather than being relegated to a back room as if it were an embarrassment.

So, it has been almost 20 years and long gone are the days that my husband lulled our son to sleep on this sofa. Now when my 14 year old stretches his lanky body across it, you can hear the sofa’s arms creak with the slightest of pressure. Consequently, I am sure that it won’t be long before we are forced to get rid of it, but when that day comes, I’ll not be embarrassed to have passersby see it on the front lawn as it awaits the rubbish truck that will haul it away. Instead there will be, I am certain, more than a twinge of sadness; it is on this sofa that my family shared late night Christmas eve fare; it is on this sofa that we read The Cricket in Times Square, Freddy the Detective, The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle, The Hobbit and many others; it is on this sofa that we watched each episode of Stargate Atlantis at least three times. I could go on, but I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say, when my sofa goes, along with it will go not only a part of my family’s history but a symbol of our homeschool as well.