Rainbow’s Point

in the 24 hours or so since i posted that letter to the homeschooling mailing list i joined, i’ve gotten several interesting responses.

one extremely interesting one pointed me to a secular (non-religious) homeschool cirriculum.

it turns out there’s a social gathering not too far from where I live tomorrow (well, today) so I’ll be heading over there to see what’s up and what I can learn.

a number of the folks on the list suggested i not look at the negatives of public school (there are many, of course), but that i look at the positives of homeschooling. or, perhaps more appropriately, that i draw up some sort of list of educational goals for my children, and that i then develop a plan to meet those goals, whether it involves homeschooling or not. a pros/cons of homeschooling vs. public school list might be helpful, and it’s likely that you’ll see it here in time as my interest and attention permit the development of such a list.

of course there is always sue and what she wants. i think some of it depends on how ian develops. but given his current personality, i can’t honestly see him doing well in a public school environment.

this is a post i wrote to a homeschool mailing list. my comments later. i wouldn’t mind hearing yours, btw. of course i know nobody reads this crap so it doesn’t really matter. also, this post occasions a new category.

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[This is long and long-winded. If you want to attack it in sections, or ignore it completely, I'll not be offended. Thanks for your energy!]

So here I am. I’ll let you take a guess at my name (since it’s on the top of my email). I, my wife, and our three children live at the very southern tip of Fort Worth, in the Crowley ISD. We’re close enough to Burleson to be really frightened of it.

We have a 2 year old son, and a pair of 1 year old twins, a boy and a girl.

The primary reason I’ve come is for information-gathering, from real live people near where I live, as opposed to folks in Washington State or New York.

Some background on the source of my interest: My wife was a military brat who spent her life in public school. While I love her to death, the level of her education shows.

By contrast, I went to a (tiny) private school in Fort Worth. Actually tiny doesn’t describe it; I went there for grades 2 through 8, and the core group of kids in my class was six kids. Between 7 and 8 many of them left the school, so that in 8th grade there were two students, me and one other boy; there was nobody in 7th grade that year, one girl in 6th grade, and about six boys in 5th grade.

But in a social circle so small, and coming to school in the middle of the year, I was immediately the odd kid out and stayed that way all through school. And because the social circle was so small I didn’t bother making friends or trying to learn how.

I then transferred into a public high school in Fort Worth, and spent four and a half years of complete and utter friendless misery being the funny-looking, not-Christian computer nerd who was editor of the useless student newspaper. My high school was a scary place where I was physically assaulted on a number of occasions, got no protection either from my parents or the administration, and I obviously want none of any of that for my kids.

And while my kids are young, this is something I think it’s worth thinking about, so that our family can make an informed choice for our kids, rather than a rush decision or simply accepting the default public education because it’s what everybody else in the neighborhood does.

I know that the Crowley ISD is relatively good, and we’ll be in the area of the new school scheduled to open, I believe for 05-06. And while my wife, a former high school teacher herself, is of the qualified opinion that public school is the way to go, I can’t say I’d want my kids going to school with the little thugs who live in our neighborhood. Obviously not blessed with the common sense God gave a slug, I won’t be letting our kids play with them in the afternoon; I can’t rightly see being comfortable sending my kids to school with them in the morning.

I’m also concerned based on my own school experiences and comparing the meanness of school children against the personalities of my kids, especially my oldest. He’s very emotionally sensitive and easily frustrated and discouraged. I have to be careful to not laugh at him when he does something childly funny; he takes it as a hurtful insult, even at this age. I can’t say I’m comfortable with the idea of subjecting him to the cruel teasings of public school kids that I know will come even in the best of schools. And because our religious pursuasion is decidedly non-Christian, I’m concerned about that as well; when I was in public school I was physically assaulted on several occasions over my religion and I don’t think that’s an appropriate thing to put my kids through.

Perhaps as important, my older son is somewhat developmentally delayed. While we don’t believe there’s anything going on that is of long term significance, it’s possible that all three of our kids will wind up in the same grade together, and that leads me to question in my mind the wisdom of sending them to public school together, because of the obvious age difference between them (a year and a few months).

All of that assumes that the public education my children would get is actually acceptable, a question I’m entirely unconvinced about. Recent public debates about various portions of public school cirricula in Texas have distressed me considerably.

The other issue is family-based: My wife, formerly of the Joshua public school system herself, will need convincing and she is unsure that we’ll be able to actually accomplish the learning discipline necessary to homeschool. I am a full time college student myself, and she works full time and we don’t have the income it takes to do stay-at-home-anybody, much as I think that’s a Good Thing.

I also find myself interested in evaluating what I can find in terms of secular-based cirricula. As I’ve indicated, a Chrisitan religious instruction set will not be appropriate for my family. I’d like to take a look at several alternatives in some detail, yet I’m not sure what options are out there, how I might see something beyond what’s published on a web page about them. And I also would like some guidence from yall more experienced folks here about what questions to ask and/or consider when making these choices.

Those are the things on my mind. I’m interested in hearing your take on it all.

Thanks most kindly.

your shrink forgets you have an appointment with her.

netgear is on my customer service shitlist so hard that i’ll never buy another netgear product again.

what happened is this:

many moons ago (think january or february) i bought some refurb netgear equipment: a couple of these and a couple of these.

what i didn’t realize is that, unlike every other piece of refurb equipment i’ve bought, netgear’s stuff is sold as-is without warranty. once the store return period runs out, you’re not only on your own, they won’t even talk to you about it.

i’d bought some of the gear for my office (the central office) and donated it. but i couldn’t afford to replace it when it failed, and the office was forced to buy a new router. because of the price difference, the wireless capability had to go away. netgear wouldn’t replace or even think about a refurb unit (which doesn’t have a serial number on it), and their attitude, even for a little non-profit, was, “well, too bad.”

so i decided never to buy their crap again. and i haven’t.

i switched to linksys. as a division of cisco, i reasoned that they couldn’t be all bad.

so i have one of these. and it seems to lock up every time i push large amounts of data through it (think a couple hundred meg at a time); the light gets stuck on, the computer reports the disconnect, and the only fix is to remove and replug the adapter (since it’s usb). this happens on both usb1.1 and usb2.0 pipes. it doesn’t seem to matter if it’s lan traffic or internet traffic (apparently there’s a difference i’m not aware of — i was under the apparently incorrect impression that, to a nic, data is data is data, but the support droid informs me that there’s a difference, although in his broken indian english he is unable to articulate exactly what that difference might be).

so we change channels. we change mtu (maximum transmission unit, which governs the size of a packet of data on the network). we change positions of the gear (which, by the way, were less than six feet apart, with no intervening walls). i even switch the linksys client-side nic to a different access point proving that it’s not the access point and other client adapters from both linksys and other manufacturers.

so the support monkey’s answer is that there is no answer and nothing else can be done and that’s it.

that’s it.

speak to non-english-speaking supervisor, who repeats the diagnosis. he’s obviously unable to provide any other solution, and refuses to tell me how i can get any other kind of answer other than “tuff titties.” there is no other solution.

but a threat to call corporate in california in the morning sends him into a tizzy, no no don’t do that, but no i still can’t solve your problem. so what other option is open to me?

you know, it shouldn’t be this hard. it just shouldn’t be. i hold plenty of animosity for support monkeys and the companies that employ them (especially when i used to do support for those very same companies and my job is now gone to the indian support monkeys). but i’ve also worked in enough call centers that i know how the game is played. and “nothing can be done” is simply a bullshit answer. and it’s not even that i know more than the monkeys; its that the monkeys refuse to acknowledge the possibility that i’m anything other than a normal non-intelligent user.

being condescended to by someone with less knowledge than me, especially when they’ve taken my job, is very irritating. and people wonder why i express problems with these people.

it’s been nearly a week since i’ve written anything and i don’t quite know what to say or why. my life has just been in a holding pattern, and i guess will be until school starts in a couple weeks.

i continue reading the usual suspect blogs, and while they remain funny and enlightening and heart-wrenching and all that, nothing i have to say on my own ever seems remotely worth reading, let alone going to the effort of writing.

i suppose a lot of it has to do with getting canned at the office the other day. a week post-termination i went in to get some mail that had come to me (textbooks i’d ordered on amazon and sent to the office knowing someone would be there to accept them), and my former boss, all sweetness and love when i was canned (since she wasn’t a party to it, only told of it after the board had already decided) was decidedly frosty.

she’d moved my old desk around, and that hurt some, but of course it wasn’t my desk anymore. she didn’t have any questions i needed to resolve; she hadn’t called before or since; just two emails to let me know my books were in.

so i got my shit and left.

officially i’m still the webmaster, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone approaches me and asks to take it over, which would be fine. i was in the middle of putting the site into a mysql database and making it speak php and be all dynamic and shit, and it was a fun project, but it’s taken a pretty serious back seat since i think i was treated pretty poorly, whatever the reasons for my termination might have been. essentially, i haven’t worked on it, and it’s taken a good bit of discipline to not simply rm -rf * all the work i’ve done. (for the uninitiated: throw it away).

so it’s pushing two weeks now. i haven’t been out of the house much, just running errands. went to the bank, to get a check from my dad, grocery shopping. that’s about it. my sleep pattern has fallen back to its natural nocturnal rythem, which is what happens when i have nothing better to do.

and of course my better half is as unhappy as ever with my parenting non-skills. three crying children unnerve me, and when i can’t get them to stop it unnerves me even more. because of the stuff at the office i can’t honestly say i even feel especially comfortable going to meetings, and i doubt i will for a long time. makes me rethink the whole friend of bill thing completely, as a matter of fact. it seems like every time i’ve taken on some kind of service obligation it’s blown up in my face.

and of course with no income until school starts, i’m going to have to cancel my therapy appointment that’s supposed to be next tuesday. sue’s employer has succeeded in making it so expensive as to render it useless. at $30 a visit, i can’t afford the copays for a weekly or even bi-weekly therapy regimen, and despite sue’s making noise of being supportive, i know what she really wants is for me to just take a happy pill and be done with it. she doesn’t see the point of spending the money on therapy, and to be honest, with milk at almost $4 a gallon and us using the better part of a gallon a day, i can understand. one appointment is basically a week’s worth of milk. given our financial position, it’s hard to justify.

yet i find myself resentful that i have to be in this position, as much as parts of it are of my own making. somebody went off on me the other day about “do you think you’re owed a job?” as i ranted and raved about how jobs in my industry are feeling the country like dr. hannibal lecter (”i’m having an old friend for dinner.”) i believe the incident happened right after i got off the phone with yet another tech support droid from somewhere in asia trying to answer questions on a product it’s unlikely she’d ever seen in a language she couldn’t speak being paid wages that aren’t legal here. the whole episode pissed me off, especially since i paid $20 for her non-help.

i’m caught in a reality where we simply don’t have enough money to make ends meet, yet we’re too rich for any kind of public assistance. the student aid helps some, but even the financial aid office’s numbers admit a gap between the need, the expected family contribution, and the actual aid award. i suppose i’m supposed to pull the difference out of my ass, like everybody else.

and of course i live in texas, where we think it’s bad to talk about birth control in school. texas ranks in the bottom 10 of all 50 states in every measure of public health and welfare spending i’ve heard in the last decade, from children insured through public insurance to availablility of public mental health services to school spending to services for the homeless, near homeless, jobless, or under-employed. we can’t even get our shit together about funding our piss-poor schools as it is.

the only thing we’re good at is executing people, apparently. (the texas court of criminal appeals is known as the rocket docket to the death chamber for very good reason.)

and sue wonders why i want to keep our kids away from public education here. “exemplary” performance around here usually means “johnny didn’t shoot at anybody to day.” forget about learning anything useful.

anyway, grouse grouse grouse. according to sitemeter, i’ve gotten 135 visits this week. nobody is saying anything if they are. i guess i’m not that interesting.

which is no surprise.

sitemeter, which i found courtesy of julie, does a number of useful things if you run a blog, one of which is tell you what people found your site via a search engine were looking for. some of them are rather interesting.

ovidril is a drug used during an ivf cycle, to stimulate ovulation.

ovarian failure is … well … pretty self-explanatory. what i don’t know is why my blog popped up, because neither have ovaries, nor have they failed. on the other hand, a single page with “ovarian” and “failure” might have produced the hit; that would have been that long post about my experiences with ivf, where sue had ovarian cysts and we had an ivf failure. (bingo. that’s a hit!)

sex “never had kids” vagina is something that … well … uhm. i suppose i know where this came from, but … what gives with the terms? what on earth were you looking for, hon?

+”how to build a blog” +code is easy enough. either read michelle’s tutorial, or use wordpress like i do.

a hemangioma is an ugly condition that usually doesn’t cause any long-term damage; it’s basically a collection of overactive capillaries just under the skin. you’d essentially think of it as a birthmark, but it’s a big pain in the butt when they collapse in on themselves, break open, and get infected like happened to the one samantha’s back. the one in her lip hasn’t done anything like that, thankfully, but it looks ugly and will need to be removed before she goes to school.

preeclampsya is a life-threatening condition that amounts to high blood pressure during pregnancy. the effects can be many, and doctors take it seriously because it can kill both mother and child. sue had this. twice.

Lagunculae leydianae non accedunt is a phrase that popped up in my fortune thing over on the right.

what’s most aggrivating about Fertility IVF program Guide after the implant of embryos is that i’m only one of two hits from google for this term. now that i’ve actually used it exactly like that, i’ll be the #1 hit.

restaurant manager aggrivation staff from hell sounds like somewhere sue used to work.

but then what do i know?

you know your life sucks when alcoholics anonymous fires you.

the kitty had an abcess in her gum. antibiotics, cleaning out the abcess, a couple days (and $250) and she should be okay.

she’s not really very happy with me right now, though.