Homeschooling: Part I

(first article in an infinite series)

The more I read about homeschooling, the more I get excited by the idea of actually doing it. I can’t wait to start, but then I think, haven’t I already started? The moment Water Boy was born, I started homeschooling. Stillmog and I became his full time teachers the second he came into the world, and we will be teaching him for the rest of our lives.

Let’s get a little more back story, shall we?

I am a social rebel at heart, and I’m always looking for ways to break out of the confines of “normal” society and conventions. As cliche as it may sound, I enjoy thinking outside the box. I don’t want my children subjected to these norms that everyone clings to, these constraints that people put on each other, telling themselves and others how to live, where to live, what to do, what to eat, how much to buy, what to wear. I don’t think it’s necessary or desirable. I think the world is full of enough sheep, and enough shepherds; my children will be the people who live in the woods with the wolves and wild animals.

Looking at public school, and my specific experiences with it, I decided homeschooling was definitely an option I wanted to research. Public schools are terrible places, for a lot of people, and for a lot of reasons. I’m not saying people can’t get anything out of them, because I know the majority of society comes from some form of public education. But if I have problems with the current society, and how it’s built and run, then why would I put my kids through the system that upholds and propagates that very society?

Public schools are proofing grounds, for proving how tough you are, how mean you can be, how quickly and completely you can conform. The people that are known to be smart, the nerds, geeks, the math club members and chess club presidents, they’re the ones tormented and ostracized, bullied and harassed. And not just by peers, either. Their teachers, if they’re good, feel helpless at being able to keep these kids interested, and if they aren’t good, they resent these brighter than normal students for breaking the curve, for trying to challenge the status quo, for trying to make the teacher think.

Even the average student, the guys or girls just trying to make it through, are told to keep their heads down, don’t make waves, don’t rock the boat. Just pass the classes and get out. If someone finds out about their passion for, say, detective comic books, or organic gardening, or volunteering at the public library, they’re just as likely to be made fun of, as to be praised or admired.

I hated school, from a young age. I always had problems with being too smart, or outshining my peers, or working ahead. This isn’t me trying to toot my own horn, it’s just the truth. I had a fourth grade report card that had my first ever C on it, and my mom set up a parent/teacher conference to find out why, because I had always made A’s easily. She wanted to know if there was a problem or issue that needed to be fixed. I didn’t find out until years later, that my teacher had deliberately given me that lower grade, because she thought I needed to learn that I couldn’t make A’s all the time.

I had issues with peers being mad at me for being smart. I had girls who would pull my hair in the hallways, I had boys that would taunt me on the playground and push me around because it was funny. When I got into middle school, there were people pressuring me to have sex, to blow off school, to do bad things and damn the consequences. I had a girl make up rumors about me sleeping with her boyfriend because she didn’t like me and wanted me to feel small. In high school it was better and worse. I was excited about some classes, and bored with others. Every couple of weeks we would pause whatever we were doing, and buckle down for the standardized tests that were required to graduate.

I made some friends, and lost them just as quickly. People were split off into little groups that consisted of clones just like them. Everybody was interested in everything but learning, in drugs and alcohol and partying, in spending their parents’ money or getting out of school so they could hurry up and make their own. People were cruel, and uncaring, and just plain dumb. I was almost expelled my sophomore year because of a girl on my soccer team, who was pressured by other girls into saying I had harassed her in a suggestive manner.

But I had to go. I was required to be among this war zone, this meat factory, this 8 to 3:30 daily grind. I hated school, I did everything I could to make it more bearable. I hid in the library, I helped found a club based on watching anime videos and reading manga during lunch, I got jobs after school that helped pay for a car. I would come home after school exhausted and drained, saddened and depressed. The few friends I had were misfits like me, too smart in general or too interested in things outside the normal interests of your average hormone driven teen.

And all this is normal, according to most education professionals. This process is necessary to learn about “real life” and the “real world”. You need to spend 8 hours a day getting facts beaten into your head, you need to be crushed in with people who don’t want to be there, who lash out at everyone around them in order to feel better about themselves, who hate learning and books and care only about where their money is going to come from when they get out of there. You need to be measured and weighed and evaluated on your performance every step of the way to make sure you’re average and meeting all the average goals. If you excel, you’re an anomaly. You’re there with teachers who are dealing with 250 different students a day, who are burned out, run down, or are just there for the summers and school holidays off. And the good teachers never have enough time to help everyone, to reach out and give every struggling child the care and compassion and help they need. You need to be with people who are all the same age, from similar backgrounds and the same geographical area, who talk just like you do and look just like you do, though not always.

Does that sound like a representation of what the real world looks like? As an adult, do you spend time with people who make you feel bad if you don’t have to? Do you only meet and work with people who live in the same city you do, or grew up the same way you did, who are all the same general age?

No? I didn’t think so.

There are also plenty of public school success stories. People who have taken a public school education and made a difference in their own lives and the lives of others around them. I’m not saying public school isn’t necessary, but I’m also not saying it’s all goodness and sunshine and rainbows. Kids whose parents can’t or won’t homeschool them, they need public school. Kids who live in dangerous neighborhoods where learning at school is safer than trying to learn at home need public school. Homeschooling is not the be-all, end-all, cure-all solution to our lacking public education system. For some people, it really isn’t possible. But I want people to realize that public school, traditional school, isn’t always necessary for growing up smart and well-educated either.

I want my son to be different, I want him to grow up happy and healthy, without the suffering and pain I experienced, that was considered part of the growing up process.

So we will probably try homeschooling. I will talk later about the me
thod we are considering, a form called “unschooling”, and more about my feelings towards homeschooling.

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Women In Science Fiction & Fantasy

This is a broad general topic that I’m trying to tackle. Part of me isn’t even sure where to start. This could span from books to movies to manga and beyond.

The pervasive dumbing down and sexualized view of women in main character roles for science fiction and fantasy has always bothered me. It’s hard to find a main female character that is strong for herself, not because she’s a wife, or a mom, or a sister, but because she’s a woman and women can be strong just like men. It’s also hard to find a woman who isn’t attached to a man romantically in some way. It must be a pre-requisite to hook up before you can save the world.

Take the trilogy I just finished reading by Anne Bishop. The Pillars of the World series starts out looking like a veritable buffet of strong women standing up against an evil patriarchal force bent on wiping out all independent women, and giving complete control over their behavior, lives, and even the ability to enjoy sex, to the men. And this is great. Go women.

But the women fighting back are scary, purposefully scary with their power. The men fear them. The women who don’t have super awesome powers fear them. Nobody thanks them for saving them. Also, there is only one woman in the whole trilogy who actually works on her own, without a man to back her up in some way or sleep with her. And she gets killed, but not before being transformed into a soul-eating creature of nightmares. Even the super-powerful scary women hook up with men by the end of the series, or are already hooked up.

I use the term hook up, because it implies to me an unnecessary plot device meant to make the characters more likable, because, hey look, they’re falling in love with that guy over there that they just met, so they can’t be all bad or scary.

If you’re going to use strong, powerful, sometimes scary women as your main characters, then use them. Make them independent, make them powerful and awe inspiring. But don’t belittle them by making it inevitable that they will fall in love, marry, and have babies and a gentle home-life. Puh-lease! Why can’t they keep on adventuring? Why can’t they keep on searching out the injustices of their worlds, and using their influence and power to change how people think?

This is a sensitive topic for me, and I get angry just thinking about it sometimes. Where are the strong female leads that go it alone? Are there no Lone Rangerettes? There has been an influx lately of supernatural heroines from the scifi/fantasy book community. And a lot of these are powerful women with great magic abilities of some kind or other. But every single one of them (that I can think of off the top of my head) are messed up about men, by men, for men, etc. Romantically, I mean. They always have to be in a relationship. And in a country where the rate of moms raising their kids as single parents is on the rise, and the age women are getting married is getting older, while they go through life and have careers, where are the women who are getting it done their way, without a guy around, helping or hindering.

Not to say, men aren’t necessary. I wouldn’t mind reading about a relationship that was actually equal, where they were working together toward a common goal and happened to be sleeping together or married or whatever. Where they weren’t making kissy-faces at each other every ten seconds in the middle of a dual arcana, or running off to the nearest bedroom to “prove their love for each other”. Why can’t he prove his love by doing the dishes or mopping up the most recent demon goo stain off the hard-wood floors?

Maybe my complaint isn’t entirely about every woman having her man, although that does piss me off. It’s more about every woman and her man showing they care by screwing each other’s brains out every chance they get. What happened to being a helpmate for each other?

To name a few of the newest, most prominent female authors writing about strong female characters, who can’t get things done without a man.

Laurell K. Hamilton has both Anita Blake and Merry Gentry. Both of whom not only have their man, they have several of them. And by several, I mean, double digits. And by double digits, I mean, her books have degenerated into 250 pages of porn with 50 pages of plot. She turned Anita Blake, who started out a woman with a calling and no time for bedroom shenanigans, into a woman whose life depended on her spending 80-90 percent of the story on her back. Or front. Or standing. At least Merry Gentry started at as she was meant to go, as the only sexual release for an entire harem of men. And Merry’s life depends on her ability to get knocked up as soon as possible by one of these guys. Also, the only other female character in the entire series is her aunt, who wants to kill her, or adopt her.

Kim Harrison has Rachel Morgan, who has gone through a couple of boyfriends in the course of five books, all of whom were obviously bad for her. But she never learns. It is her fatal flaw, that she can’t seem to keep the bad things they’ve done in the front of her mind when they’re around, asking her to bend over backwards to help them. But hey, she’s also possibly about to sleep with her female roommate. I’d like to see that actually developed into a relationship.

Kelley Armstrong has the Women of the Otherworld series, which is all about strong female characters. Every one of them is involved with a guy. Take Elena for example. She’s a werewolf. She’s married to the guy who turned her unwillingly into a werewolf, after years of struggle trying to come to terms with him biting her because he wanted a werewolf girlfriend. She finally came to her senses(sarcasm) and decides to marry the guy who changed her life completely, making her a pariah of normal society and impossible for her to live a normal life ever again. It’s sort of like those women who turn around and fall in love with their rapist. Doesn’t make sense.

Then there’s Eve the witch, who is actually a pretty kick-ass lady. Too bad she’s caught up in this cat-mouse romantic thing with Kris, her former lover. She can’t just turn out to be a really cool superhero? She has to have a messy relationship with an on-again, off-again love-interest.

One of the newest main characters is Jaime the ghost whisperer, who is forty years old, and apparently loses all self-control, common sense, and said forty years of life experience when put next to a boy she likes. Her love interest is Jeremy the werewolf, and I actually liked him, until the author dumbed him down to replace intelligence with hormones. They could have been two mature, experienced adults entering into a loving and romantic relationship, both of them know what they were getting into, understand that they each have lives already. But instead it was turned into this raunchy romp where they hop into bed left and right, and dirty talk during life-threatening situations.

These are just a few of the current popular reads. But they are popular, and the authors are female. Now, I understand that real-life relationships are messy and confusing, but these are supposed to be extra-ordinary women. And they appear to never learn from their mistakes. They pick the same kind of men to fall for, or they go back to the men they fell for before, and they spread their legs at the drop of a hat. Where are the relationships ba
sed on mutual respect and understanding, with sex an important but not all-important part?

Next, I’ll post about some of the current popular fantasy books with some strong, unattached women in them. Hopefully I can find some.

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