7 Quick Takes Friday: Weird World

 
Life has been hectic, family has been nothing short of chaos-inducing (both sides, for very different reasons), my house is a wreck, and my mind isn’t doing a whole lot better.  But, as I learned as a plebe at the Academy, nothing is quite as bad as Plebe Summer, so I can put up with anything [...]

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Energy for Homeschooling

Jen at Conversion Diary had a post about homeschooling questions and worries.  I found the first one particularly interesting: “I worry about getting physically and mentally ovewhelmed…”
(Now, the irony is, I’m revising this draft and posting it after a day that

started before dawn (ick!  I fulfilled that quota in the Navy)
involved eight hours of driving
saw [...]

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The more things change…

Being a homeschooler is fascinating.  All that history we never talked about?  Well, now I get to explore it in depth and with a lot more lessons in “history is interesting because it is made by real people” and a lot less of “memorize these disconnected dates and names until you hate history and everyone [...]

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7 Quick Takes Friday: Homeschooling Egypt (updated!)

 
(click on the logo to visit Jen’s weekly hosting of this event at Conversion Diary!)
I say this hesitantly, but I might be sort of getting the hang of homeschooling.  The porch got painted, the gardens got some weeding, the kids were both occupied and edified, and dinner never slumped to the level of frozen pizza.  [...]

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Why homeschoolers make better citizens…

In spite of everyone from my daughter’s psychologist to the religious education secretary at church lamenting homeschoolers’ lack of “socialization” compared to “normal” school kids, studies show that homeschooled students turn out to be more involved, more informed citizens.
Why homeschoolers make better citizens…
1.  We’re used to reading.  A lot.  We actually read the news, the [...]

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Health Care and Homeschoolers

There are so many things wrong with the health care bill, I hardly know where to start.  Fortunately, some bloggers have started doing analysis of the gigantic bill that your Congressman probably didn’t read.  Jatticus posted a great synopsis of many of the problematic sections of the bill in “The Devil in the Details.”  It’s a [...]

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Homeschooler Conference: Dale Ahlquist

Ok, better late than never…
The last speaker from the IHM Homeschooler Conference that I’m going to comment on was Dale Ahlquist, the president of the American Chesterton Society.  (For those of you who are encountering Chesterton for the first time, there’s a very helpful (and funny) tab at their website labelled “Who is this guy and [...]

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7 Quick Takes Friday: Homeschooler Conference

I was going to try to write this last week, half-way through the IHM Homeschooler Conference in Washington, DC, but the last talk finished after 9pm, I’d been up since a time of morning I’d rather forget, and I still needed a shower.  So, instead, I’ll post this as a summary of the homeschooler conference [...]

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Homeschooler conference: Prof. Joseph Pearce (part 2)

Prof. Joseph Pearce’s second talk was “A Matter of Life and Death: The Battle for a True Education.”
He offered his own life and conversion as proof of his thesis.  Given a mostly secular, only sort of Protestant, anti-Catholic education that skipped philosophy and concentrated all of its history curriculum on the *glorious* rise of socialism [...]

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Homeschooler Conference: Prof. Joseph Pearce (part 1)

Ok, this had very little to do with homeschooling, but they were a couple of great talks.  Prof. Joseph Pearce of Ave Maria University talked on “Finding Tolkein’s Catholicism in the Lord of the Rings” and “The Fight for a Good Education: A Matter of Life and Death” (coming tomorrow; I took pages and pages [...]

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