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Lately I made the mistake of commenting on a few negative articles about homeschooling. It's always a mistake. I'm not going to change anyone's mind; I'm just going to raise my blood pressure after beating my head against the same tired and refuted arguments. The commenters asserting negative ideas about homeschooling are not interested in counter opinions from people who actually know more than one homeschooling family. They have an anecdote about "this one kid in college" who blah blah blah. ...

I've noticed some people seem to have an odd definition of "skeptic". "Oh, he won't believe that, he's a skeptic." Or "I showed him the news article, but he won't believe it: he's a skeptic." They seem to use "skepticism" and "skeptic" as an insult, and it seems to mean a person is close-minded. ...

As parents, we make thousands of decisions every day which affect our children. Some of theses decisions are very simple and some are complex. Some are active decisions, and some are passively made by just taking the "default" action. Even not acting at all is a decision. And no one ever wants to get called out for making the wrong parenting decision: after all, making wrong decisions is what bad parents do, and I'm not a bad parent! ...

One of the cool homeschooling parents in our group puts on a chemistry class for young kids. I'm the first to admit that teaching chemistry to 5- and 7-year-olds is probably not really "teaching them chemistry" as most people think about it. You can explain atoms, electron shells, covalent bonds, and chemical reactions all you want, but it will not really "stick". But that's not really the point. ...

I had big plans for the homeschool today… ...

Just a quick little note. The young one and I were playing Dino Store for a bit this morning and I could see it was winding down. So I came up with what I thought might be a quick little one-off activity/game involving coins. I laid out pairs of groups of coins side by side, and the goal was for her to figure out which group had more money. … ...

A few months back I stumbled across The Slovelglove workout. It seemed like an interesting idea, but I didn't like the name. So I call it "Sledgercising". I had a few notes/thoughts on it, thus, this article. ...

Something happened and I can't explain it: therefore the answer is something which is many orders of magnitude more unexplainable than the original mystery. ...

So I'm just your normal, every day, non-religious homeschooling parent. I'm a bit liberal in areas, a bit libertarian in others, and maybe a bit conservative in a few fiscal areas. Then I come across this: ...

Many of my friends and acquaintances fall into the "non-conventional diet" bucket (by "diet" I mean way of eating, not necessarily a weight loss diet). I'm generally OK with that. I don't see much evidence for most of it, but mostly I don't worry about what other people eat or don't eat. I myself have tread down the non-conventional path a few times. ...

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