March Homeschool Miscellany

I would love to say things are picking up but they’re really not. Issues are abounding, some of them standard teenage ones, some of them teenage politics I thought we might have a prayer of avoiding if we avoided using the school system (very naive thought there, because to completely avoid it I guess we’d have to exist in an insular community with only mostly like-minded individuals), a lot probably stemming from the other thing even though we’re trying to both ignore it and deal with it as much as possible.

!schooling 0000I18c - I22n

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] We spent most of the last week recovering from whatever plague we had and trying to get back into the bookwork. What this meant was that we stayed home all week and I let the kids do whatever books they wanted which meant 6yo only did Reading Eggs books all week when they are supposed to pick different subjects.

Equal rights

Earlier today, I got an email from AllOut requesting signatures for this petition (the image from which I’ve stolen). Last week I got this email from Getup requesting donations to get a letter by a psychologist to the government run as an ad in a couple of major newspapers. The week before that, another email from GetUp wanting yet another marriage equality petition signed. Sometime before that, another AllOut petition to shut down clinics in Ecuador pretending they could “cure” gay people.

Not quiet on the !schooling front

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] I just haven’t been writing about it. Last week, 6yo drew a picture of Venom from Spiderman with black whiteboard marker on paper, including sounding out the name and checking with JJ after writing it out. This week just gone has been crazy. Monday Stay home day. Started off fine. I opted to sleep in (ie stay in the nice warm bed snuggled up with the nice warm kids until they woke up).

Marriage equality

I got Yet Another Email urging people “fighting” for marriage equality to inundate politicians with messages of support for same sex marriage. I fail at comprehending why this is an issue. We are in a country that supposedly has a secular government, supposedly is big on giving a “fair go”, supposedly tolerant of all “race, colour and creed”. It’s also supposedly progressive thinking. What we appear to have is a government that rolls over when religious groups and big businesses cry, throws money at people who want it and ignore the ones that need it, is cited globally as being racist, and cannot accept the fact that sometimes boys fall in love with boys and girls fall in love with girls.

Border protection

[imported from livejournal and backdated] A couple of weeks or so ago we received a mailout from Senator Judith Adams, Liberal Senator for Western Australia, Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate. There is one thing I hate above all else, and that is fearmongering. I am all for intelligent discussion and debate and being exposed to the many facets of a situation so that one can make an informed decision as to which side of the fence they are going to sit on so to speak.