on 
Dis be my mad posse, yo
It’s hard to master words you never use. When you’re homeschooled, this would include words like *friend.*
Because you don’t have them.
This report The Swift Report: Home-Schooler Misspells ‘Friend’ in National Spelling Bee
has particular resonance for me. I got a “graduation” and “commencement” announcement for Buzzkill’s oldest. Apart from a couple years while in Califonia, he has been homeschooled from day one. A bunch of homeschoolers are getting together in a VFW hall in Diebold Ohio to celebrate their many years of exclusion from society. Good luck coping, now that the real world, with all its faults and temptations is calling.
Lack of societal skills/oversheltering is one thing. What pisses me off is the lack of ambition this kid left Jesus Memorial Pretend High School with. Parents are college grads, Skippy, the dad works for Emperor Gates. So, the family is not Cletus and Brandine. The kid is going to now try to get a job fixing computers to save money to *take classes* at Praise Jesus College of Faith Based Science. This is about the same path to success that his Aunt Milquetoast took, which is to say, dead end job and no degree, here I come.
Now, I am no stranger to an utter lack of a long range plan coming out of reality-based high school. I knew I was going to college and that money made the choice of college pretty clear. Obviously, a big public university, where I could be anonymous while I adjusted. I figured that between the beer and sexathons, I would find time to figure out what direction to point my life. But I at least knew that now was the time to go exploring, in a situation where I would not be overmatched or overwhelmed. .
I suppose it’s OK that this kid is going to get his feet wet gradually. Still, if he had been to reality school instead of virtual school, he could be hitting the ground running, instead of his long range plan being to mark time living with mom and dad until God gives me a career path and tells me to take a wife.
Stumble It!
I know that this is a very old blog entry of yours, so I hope that you don’t mind my comment. People home-school for lots of reasons, not just to over shelter their kids. Schools today are different. When I was a kid and wiggled too much in my seat, the teacher dealt with it; when my kid wiggled in his seat, they insisted that I dope him up or he would be put in a “special class” in spite of his good grades and intelligence. I gave him the Ritalin against my better judgment from age 5 (yep, kindergarten) to age 8 when it started making him sick and the pediatrician recommended home school as an alternative to the drugs. My local school system pressured many other parents of boys in our large urban community and we all felt like we had two options; lawyer up or start educating in the DIY method of homeschooling. 1 out of every 33 students in our community (Edmond, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City)is now home-schooled. So we have all kinds of co-op group classes. Monday-art class, Tuesday-chess club and boy scouts, Wednesday- literature class, Thursday- P.E. and soccer or baseball or basketball (depending on season) practice with YMCA, Friday-Park recess day, and Saturday-YMCA Soccer games or Baseball or Basketball games. The challenge is getting the school work done IN SPITE of everyone’s busy social schedule. The local colleges are very accepting of our money of course, and most home-schooled students start taking college courses around age 16 with concurrent enrollment like a lot of the public schooled kids. More parents like us will be homeschooling until the public schools figure it out and remember how to discipline kids without medicating them. And yes, we have our own graduation, prom, football team and cheerleaders (it is Oklahoma, after all) and yes, the cheerleaders are cute and their skirts are short. LOL. I hope that this has opened your mind a little bit about my “alternative lifestyle.”
Sounds like a different scenario. You are socializing your kids. My bitch is with homeschooling to avoid socializing your kid. It sounds like your lifestyle beyond school allows for socializing that your version of home school may not provide. Cloistering your kids 24/7 handicaps them. Homeschooling as a part of that and exacerbates the deficit – that is my principal point.