Administrivia

A term I've stolen from a librarian friend. Today was the epitome of the first day of school. Getting the tech to work, reading the code of conduct and setting up expectations, workout out where we'll sit and how we'll make sure everybody's heard and can work together.

Thankfully, this doesn't count as a day of education and when we get sick of it, we can take a break to walk to the library or something.

I saw a tweet about homeschool, it was clearly from a teenager, talking about how homeschooling was dumb, you need the time to build memories with your friends. It's really funny, that's not at all how I remember school. All my friends of any depth were part of my extracurricular activities. School was a time spent not getting in trouble, making sure I got my reading and work done and listening to endless lessons.

My kids recount their days at public school in a similar way. Heck, my kids even came home to me for months saying they couldn't get their school chum's phone numbers because they weren't allowed to ask during school. I was stunned.

We do have to work a little bit harder to keep in touch with those school friends. It's true. But we find them at our activities and at the library sometimes, not to mention friends from our immediate neighborhood who we see every day. In a place where nobody is saying "you shouldn't socialize." By home schooling, or in our case working on school work at home, we're eliminating the "you shouldn't" from interactions with friends. If they want to work on assignments with their friends, they're welcome to-in an environment where a stressed out teacher is not trying to make sure the entire class is not disrupted by friendly work chatter.

I know all this setup stuff is a bit annoying, but we'll be done with it today. Our materials have mostly arrived, excepting the Calvert materials for Persephone. I think I'll hunt down some low stress writing exercises for her. She's never had to do any substantial writing work, and now she's enrolled in a writing based curriculum.