Utterly Meaningless

I’m with her. Sure, it is sometimes hard, but no harder than life. If we weren’t homeschooling I’d have to get them all up and dressed and to a school early in the morning and that, I tell you, is hard.

Cakewalk, lol. Are the teachers jealous? Hmmm?

Stephanie stole my answer, so… ditto. 😀 Life is hard, get used to it.

Sometimes it is hard work, not in the physical sense but in the mental sense. But it is, hands down, the most rewarding work I’ve ever undertaken.

After reading through as many of the garbage posts as I could stand, I still could not figure out what the homeschooling Mom who posted originally was so “desperate” about.

Nance

I read the whole thing, Nance, and it actually WAS garbage — it’s explained further down that it’s a troll formula set up by an anonymous thug or two, presumably because they find teachers and homeschoolers such suckers for it, who get all frustrated and jump in blind and keep it going . . .
(Heck, homeschoolers have their own bad barrels for that, why go dabble in someone else’s trash talk? Might make sense for a homeschooler willing to hold her nose trying to gin up traffic back to her own sites for ad revenue orwhatever, but no minds will be changed or opened in that kind of garbage “discussion.”)

About the original poster’s supposed desperation, maybe we were meant to notice she was constantly pregnant and tending to infants and preschoolers all day at home, during the years she claims to have been a model ps teacher’s aide and field trip mom for her oldest two? And yet she’s supposedly a conservative Christian following this new call to home-educate her brood, so why is she asking for advice from schoolteachers then, instead of her church and HSLDA, prayer with her husband, etc?

Doesn’t pass the smell test.

Interesting commentary, JJ. You arrived at about the same conclusion I did after deciding that train wreck was a waste of time. It did get me to thinking, however, about the larger population’s predisposition to viewing parenting in general and homeschooling in particular as hard work, and that has led to some interesting and potentially productive discussions in other forums, so all was not totally a lost cause.

Homeschooling has been very hard for me at times but then as some posters have said, life is hard. When my one son was in the hospital for 2.5 years and I was homeschooling my 14, 12, 10, 7 and taking care of my infant and prgenant with my EIGHTH child, homeschooling was very hard.

Dealing with the injusticves and harshness and general ugliness of the publicschool system is also challenging, although it can be easier to ignore than homeschooling where your kids are with you so much of the time.

By characterizing homeschooling as hard, it certainly doesn’t mean that it is n’t well worth every bit. Now that those 14, 12, and 10 year olds are all in college and living well on their own, I am so grateful I homeschooled despite the mental and physical hard work. They are wonderful, unique individuals who are also grateful I didn’t subject them to the boredom, humiliations, bullying, etc etc of most schools.

Thanks for the chance to share my two cents…
Mimi

It depends entirely on the cooperation of my student.

Good line, Unique! Maybe we could publicly advance the proposition that hard or easy is based solely on the degree to which the student wants to be there! 🙂

An what does anyone mean by “hard” anyway, hard to endure and unpleasant if not unsatisfying ? But what about the concept of engagement and absorption and flow? This reminded me of wise words I blogged last year at Liza’s Culture Kitchen, about the damage we do as adults by teaching kids life is “hard”:

Mac co-inventor Paul Graham writes:

By the time they reach an age to think about what they’d like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one’s work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. . .

Actually they’ve been told three lies: the stuff they’ve been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.

The most dangerous liars can be the kids’ own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. . .If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong.

Aaack! Don’t call kids “students” unless you modify it with what they’re voluntarily studying, and not just with the situation that someone else is requiring them to ‘do a certain dance.’ That just plays into educratic styling that school (of some sort) is the place for kids to be. Kind of like the corporate outlook that adults are quantified as a “worker” of some sort.

We’re people, not some system’s widget.

Also, having a kid in public school is hard, too. What with meeting all the requirements and deadlines, fund raisers, PTA support, teacher support, factoring in the stress of the kid doing well, and weller, and wellest, … and then continually surpassing his or her ‘potential’ (you’re never ‘done’) without the kid becoming such an overacheiver that the school can’t actively engage him/her … plus dealing with intepersonal differences, cliques, bullies, illnesses, schedules, bad weather, and making time for extracurriculars, — and multiplying the busyness for each child — yeah, school’s a lot of work, too.

No matter where your child passes the time until he or she is off on the adult adventure (and even after), if we want that time to have been productive, someone, somewhere has to put some effort into it. Even if you don’t put effort into raising your child(ren), it’s still ‘hard’ — just a different experience when the Establishment gets on your case.

Really? Studying plays into schoolish educrat labeling? I would’ve expected that in relation to words like “scholar” and “schooler” never mind FTE and instruction, curriculum, etc but not so sure I buy it when it comes to the language of learning and studying not necessarily related to school.

School doesn’t limit the language of the mind but using it, not all thinkers, writers, readers, and intellects have anything to do with school or compulsion. I think individual minds from the ancients forward had all the intellectual words, and School appropriated them, not the other way around . . .

Remind me sometime when things are slow, to pontificate about how the same thing happened to the word “doctor!” We wuz ROBBED . . .

First off, I am so happy I found this site! A HS forum for those dreaded “liberals”! Where have you been all my life! Funny I found this site when I googled homeschooling + evangelical looking for stats after watching the doc movie “Jesus Camp”.
Anyway, on this subject. I constantly have people tell me they could never homeschool because it would be too “hard”. But these are always the same people who find parenting in general hard. So many people I encounter can’t comprehend how I could choose to spend all day with my kids.
I say homeschooling is a lifestyle choice. I don’t know any HS’ers who say it’s hard, although they might say “teaching math is hard” or “getting my kids motivated is hard”. I think if you are homeschooling because “God told you to” or your husband insists on it, or your kids been expelled, then maybe it is hard for you. But most HS’ing parents make that choice as part of a bigger picture of their parenting approach. It’s a huge committment, yes! But I can’t imagine doing it any differently.

A HS forum for those dreaded “liberals”!
******
Good for us — we’ve achieved “dreaded” status! 🙂

Nance

Yeah, I guess so. I mean we must be dreaded, or else the right wouldn’t be constantly attacking the left, turning everything into a partisan issue, and using the word “liberal” like a nasty racial epithet .