I was talking to a close homeschooling friend the other day. I mentioned that I thought I was going to vote for a particular candidate in a congressional race because (among other things) he explicitly states that he supports parents’ rights to educate their children. She asked me why it mattered to me. I told her it probably mattered less on a national level than state, but I don’t want any new laws restricting homeschooling. She actually said she would be for a law that requires standardized testing. I was shocked. Her reasoning behind this was that she knows a family that is considering homeschooling their highschool age kids but the mother doesn’t even have a high school diploma herself. She’s afraid those kids would not get a good enough education and fall through the cracks. Basically, she didn’t think standardized testing would affect her because she does a great job teaching her kids and they always do great on tests. The conversation kept going back and forth – where does it stop? What if they decided that testing wasn’t sufficient and wanted to come into your house and see what you were using and even had to approve it? What if they made you use the books that the schools use? What if they had to take each test that the kids in school had to take? Before you know it, your kids are getting the same education they would get from going to school, nothing better. She saw no problem with this! I suggested that perhaps she should just go ahead and send her kids to school then. But then again, she does use a lot of school text books in their homeschool. I prefer to teach my kids, not have the government tell me how to. I don’t want to start down that road and don’t know any other homeschoolers who would.
Then there was a post on TWTM message boards about Obama and his stance on the 2nd Amendment. Someone posted “Since when is it unreasonable to make sure we keep guns (especially things like assault weapons) out of the hands of criminal? These are just common sense positions any right minded person should support.” And I saw the whole parallelism to the homeschooling conversation I had a few days before with my friend. One could say that it is not unreasonable to keep homeschooling rights out of the hands of the incapable. Some common sense positions any right minded person (who doesn’t homeshool) might support could include things like standardized testing, requiring using a particular curriculum, overseeing the work done in the home, etc. Where does it end? Anyone who doesn’t want to go down one slippery slope should not support going down another slippery slope just because it doesn’t affect them. It does.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I always feel like I’ve let my 2 regular readers down. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to write about – there have been several times when I’ve thought to myself, “I need to blog about that.” It’s not that I don’t have the time – although I keep busy, I have 5 or 10 minutes most days where I could sit and post something. I guess it’s mostly that I just haven’t felt like it. With the start of our school last week and Boxman traveling some lately, I just haven’t felt like writing. I really was going to sit and write something witty this past weekend, but our wireless internet wasn’t working. I don’t know what went wrong with it. We had a storm Friday night and after that, it was down. The dsl modem showed no internet connection. The wireless router was working as I could print from my laptop. I was eventually able to connect the dsl directly to my laptop, but it still isn’t working with the wireless. Do you know how spoiled one can get surfing wirelessly? I am not able to multitask like watch tv while checking e-mails and reading my message boards. I’m trying to figure out if this is resulting in less tv watching, less surfing, or just plain staying up later at night to get my fix of both things. Thank goodness the Olympics are over or might not get any sleep. No, actually, I miss the Olympics. I even stood staring at the black screen of the tv today thinking, “Gee, I really miss the Olympics. I wish they weren’t over yet.” Considering how many nights I stayed up too late watching them, it’s really a good think they are over. I have an Olympic hangover.
So what was that I said earlier about having something to write about? I think I forgot what it was.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Once again, too many days have passed since my last post. It is that time of year when I spend many hours planning, plotting, and preparing for the torture that I will soon be putting my children through. I often wonder why I spend so much time with the planning part of it all. I could easily just pull out the books for each subject and do the next thing. I wonder though, if I would be less likely to stay on track for the year. Would I ever get the books done, or would we still be doing them all summer long? Does it matter? Well, I guess it might matter for Doodles this year just in case she does stick with her decision to go to high school next year. Anyway, I’m going to continue planning so that hopefully we will be able to jump right in on Monday when the Classical Conversation classes start.
Oh, and I neglected to get on-line Friday to post a happy birthday for Boxman. It was his birthday on Friday and instead of getting on the computer, I helped Doodles make some stuffed shells for lunch with tiramisu for dessert. Yummy. We had a tkd camp that started that day, but I dropped the kids off and came back home to get Boxman and go to a wine tasting before coming back home to eat leftovers from lunch and watch Nip/Tuck season 2 on dvd. I think it was a nice relaxing day for him.
Happy Birthday Boxman!
Filed under: Louisiana
I used the easy-to-use, free of charge, on-line forms with free e-filing that the state of LA has. It’s what I used last year, and probably the year or two before that too. I filed back at the very beginning of March and we were due a refund that was supposed to be direct deposited into our account. I quickly received our federal refund, but the state one wasn’t showing up. I checked the status on-line and it kept saying that it hadn’t been processed. I finally thought to call them the other day and was informed that our return had been “randomly selected” for review. The fact that we were sent a bill back in January for $20 plus $2 interest from the previous year’s taxes, makes me doubt that there was anything random about it. The woman on the phone told me that it was past the 12 weeks that they had to review it, so she would send it to a supervisor to be processed. The refund showed up in our account today with an extra $6.54 added to what I thought we would get. Did the state actually *pay* us interest? I don’t know why the amount would differ like that otherwise, especially since everything is rounded off to the nearst dollar. Of course the state will be getting it all back plus some next month when I have to pay our next installment of estimated state taxes.
