Random Thoughts

For one of the POV's of the current chapter I'm working on, I can't decide between two characters for a certain lesson to pay off.

They involve Finny and becoming a True Gardener (by the Law and Lore of my fanfic).

Basically it will either be from Nina Hopkin's POV or Finny himself.

With Hopkin's it will go from Finny displaying the change to her gushing over Ciel and Lizzy (and tormenting Mr Stiff).

If I do Finny's POV it will have him thinking through the lesson and acting before continuing on with chores when Amber rocks up.

However it's possible the bigger question is:

"in the age of no body shaming, there is still one thing you're allowed to body shame apparently, and that is men with small dicks. Greta Thunberg was arguing on Twitter with a guy called Andrew Tate, who is on house arrest in Romania, for sex trafficking. Do you know what she said? 'you have small dick energy'. She could have said 'Andrew, you're on house arrest, in Romania, for sex trafficking' but apparently on the list of crimes that rates below having a small dick."

I mean, both my husband and I were homeschooled from elementary through high school and did remarkably well in academia, receiving 3.7+ GPAs in a rigorous academic college, and we earned well above average scores on the SAT and ACT. He is now a talented software engineer having been promoted to a senior level and team lead by age 26, and I was a paralegal to the most experienced attorney in a boutique law firm working on multi-million dollar cases and was told I was the best he's had in his 30yr career.

The point of this is not to brag, but to illustrate that your claim that homeschool kids "always end up behind" or that homeschool-positive stances only come from ignorant parents is simply not true. We're not even an exception that proves the rule. We both have known lots of other home schooled kids throughout our life who are very successful and well-adjusted individuals.

It is absolutely true that there are kids who are home schooled that end up incompetent, socially-inept adults. They are not a majority. This isn't even an opinion thing, home schoolers statistically on average fall between the 65th and 85th percentiles on standardized test scores (x, x). Three quarters go to college (vs 44% average), with higher retention and graduation rates, higher average college GPAs, and higher graduate school rates. Research studies have found that home schooled adults either fared better or just as well as conventionally-schooled peers (x).

Anecdotally, one of the parents in my co-op growing up was a English professor at University of Texas. He once graded one of our high school papers instead of our regular parent-teacher to give us an idea of what to expect in uni, and he said our essays were better than most of his college freshmen's. He said that he consistently noticed a trend in previously home schooled students doing better than conventionally schooled kids, and that was what directly influenced him to start home schooling their own kid.

At BEST, they're deluded, convinced that credentials are the most important thing, as if intelligence, wisdom, experience and knowledge come only with a piece of paper conferred by some *other* credentialed idiot. Despite the trillions of dollars poured into public education over the decades, and the creation of the Department of Education in the 1970s, which squandered many billions more, US schools are rated far worse now than they were when the DOE was created. It made things worse year after year after year.

At WORST, they have a personal financial stake in steering as many kids as possible into the state run schools--whether it's because they're bureaucrats, and bureaucrats ALWAYS want first and foremost to maintain and expand the wealth and power of the bureaucracy, or because they belong to the teacher's union (another bureaucracy interested first and foremost in their own benefit), or big government supporters who want to control what kids see and hear and learn (or more to the point, DON'T LEARN). Or, sadly, all too many parents, who view public school as a "free" (they're paying at gunpoint in any case) babysitting service to warehouse their kids while both parents work during the day. Public schools are, for the most part, a poor joke. Vast numbers of kids "graduate" high school unable to read or do basic math or even think clearly, and the results have been consistently worse decade after decade after decade.

Harmonics - Antonia Tyz Peeples

American , b. 1957 -

He is... dust...

on your 95 year old

domestic short-air.