They Shouldn’t BE Homeschooling!

Okay, an acquain­tance of ours has repeat­ed­ly moaned to me recent­ly because her daugh­ter isn’t learn­ing any­thing. Truly—they’re sup­pos­ed­ly home­school­ing the kid, and she is still com­plete­ly stuck on the same math con­cepts she could­n’t learn over two years ago in pub­lic school. Despite tutors.

(Warn­ing: THEY ARE NOT A TYPICAL HOMESCHOOLING FAMILY IN ANY WAY AND SHOULD NOT BE USED AS AN EXAMPLE OF NORMALITY.)

But Mom can’t help the kid with the math, because she nev­er learned that in school either. This is third-grade frac­tion stuff, folks.¹Mom has­n’t tak­en any of sev­er­al peo­ple up on offers to help the kid with the math. She knows quite well that her daugh­ter will, at best, be offen­sive­ly rude to any­one who attempts it.

So why should the daugh­ter wor­ry about learn­ing it if Mom has got­ten along for near­ly 40 years with­out know­ing it? Mom has no cred­i­bil­i­ty here.

Today Mom post­ed a mes­sage to the mail­ing list for our home­school­ing group. It’s a sur­vey to find out how much TV their kids watch and what kinds. I know why she’s doing this—she repeat­ed­ly com­plains that all her daugh­ter will do is watch TV, but she won’t take the TV out of the child’s room “because her father bought it for her.” She sits in front of a TV much of the day her­self, so of course—again, no credibility.

She list­ed what her daugh­ter watched yes­ter­day, stat­ing that it was a typ­i­cal day:
5 hours of cartoons
1.5 hours of sitcoms
1 hour of “edu­ca­tion­al” (but she does­n’t know what that was, and the kid can’t tell her, so it might as well have been anoth­er cartoon)
2 hours of “just back­ground noise”—while the kid was sup­pos­ed­ly doing writ­ten work that nev­er actu­al­ly got done, so dol­lars to donuts kid was watch­ing TV instead of doing any­thing else.

That is 9.5 hours of tele­vi­sion. In one day.

I’m 35 years old and can­not EVER remem­ber watch­ing 9.5 hours of TV in one day in my life. Not even once.

She also used her Playsta­tion and played com­put­er games (not the edu­ca­tion­al kind) for sev­er­al hours on that same day, but her moth­er does­n’t con­sid­er Playsta­tion time TV time. I lump it all togeth­er as “screen time.”

Is it any won­der that I actu­al­ly encour­aged this moth­er to send her kid back to pub­lic school next week? And she decid­ed to do it—then changed her mind because “there’s just too much paperwork.”

I do get real­ly, tru­ly pissed off at this kind of thing, espe­cial­ly since there are too many peo­ple out there who try to sup­port their polit­i­cal agen­das by using fam­i­lies like theirs as exam­ples as if all home­school­ers are that stu­pid and irresponsible.