Good morning!
I'm feeling crabby today, but before we get to the bitching, a couple of updates...
The slumber party was a success, and the Jack Daniels/Diet Rite on the back porch (and a closed door between me and the little darlings) almost drowned out the terrified screams of her guests as Madeleine put a flashlight on her face and told scary ghost stories at midnight. More on this later.
Mark had us over to his house on Saturday night. He is getting through each day. The good news is that he has 90 sick leave days and the doctor wrote him a note excusing him for a month. He may not need it but he has it. I am glad.
Meredith is back in 1st grade. You may recall that she was "reassigned" back to the Montessori preschool program several days ago. Her ex-classmates wistfully yearned for 1. Meredith or 2. No homework, you take your pick. Several of them requested to be reassigned back to the Montessori Classroom Of No Homework And Meredith. So she was brought back, and made an 80 on her spelling test on Friday. The words were changed to be a little easier.
Here are a few things that piss me off.
Homeschooling mothers with atrocious grammar and spelling skills. I just about loose my mind when I see homeschooling mother’s blog's who don’t seem to know the basic rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation. (Promiscuous use of the apostrophe's drives me to the brink). Yeah, don't email me with my spelling errors. I pay fine young women and men who have obtained expensive college educations and passed grueling tests a pretty penny to educate my children.
Shouldn't you have to demonstrate some sort of competency to homeschool? I hate to get the Nanny State involved in more aspects of our lives, and I don't think that a certain level of formal education is required to successfully homeschool, but if you can't write the Queen's English, you shouldn't homeschool.
People who don’t wear their hearing aids. There’s an old guy at work who refuses to wear his hearing aids and all of my witty bon mots fall on, literally, deaf ears. Nothing worse than saying something that causes the rest of the room to break into laughter (at me, or with me? I’m not saying) and the person I was saying it to looks up and says “Huh?”
People who forward emails without deleting the original headers.This is the same person who, many years ago, took a private email I had sent him linking to an article pointing out that Hitler was a vegetarian and fiercely anti cigarettes and forwarded it to everybody on campus. Thank the Good Lord Above that I hadn’t included any obnoxious remarks in the forward.
And then he had the nerve to ask me last month if I could forward him the article again!
People who stick ther heads in my office door and say incomprehensible things. There’s this guy at work who stuck his head in my door and said “I think all students should have to give their Pell (financial aid) checks to me.” and then wiggled his eyebrows a/la Groucho Marx. It was clear that he thought it was a dreadfully witty thing to say, but it made no sense at all.
Apparently he does this to everybody.
The other day, “Republicans mostly wear wigs, I think.”
Just. Go. Away.
White adoptive parents who apologize to adult asian adoptees for adopting asian children. Look, I get it, KADs (Korean adult adoptees who were adopted by white parents back in the 60s and 70s. Many are angry at white adoptive parents of asian children. Very, very, very angry). Your adoption was a tragic error. You're the innocent victim of a great geo-political conspiracy. Asian orphans would be better off growing up in an orphanage or dying on the streets. (There are actually people on the Net who write things like this). White parents are the Antichrist, Great Satan, Imperialists, yada.
Fine. Rant away. I’m an angry adoptee sometimes myself, although I gather that since I share race with my parents I’ve lost all my street cred, yo. You have some legitimate grievances and I shall always make sure that my children are connected to their homeland.
But why…why in the name of all that is good, and holy, and pure, and true…why do white parents adopting asian kids hang around email lists and blogs for daily, weekly, monthly, yearly doses of the hatin’.
They hate us, people! There is nothing you can do to redeem yourself! You, The Great Satan, are an Transracial Abductee!
If you try to give your baby exposure to their birth culture you’re fakin’ it and making a fool of yourself “pretending to be Asian.”
If you DON’T try to give your baby any exposure to their birth culture, well, please, stop reading this blog and kill yourself IMMEDIATELY.
Trying to appease an angry KAD is like trying to convert a shark into a vegetarian. Just give up and send your kid back to their home country.
Make sure to poke some airholes in the box used for shipping, okay?
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19 comments:
Congratulations to Meredith for starting an uprising and causing change to an unfair regime! She's got a great political career ahead of her.
Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle!
Any kid who says, "How did they arrange all the burials?" is waaaaay smarter than everyone else in the class, spelling be damned. You can't teach emotional intelligence.
You make me feel so much better! 1. Because there is someone else as disgusted by the atrocious spelling and grammar of homeschooling parents, and 2. Because you helped me shake off my astonishment and confused guilt that I want to adopt children without being a Transracial Abductor!
You make me smile...thank you!
I could not have said it better myself. I read a Jane Trenka interview in an FCC newsletter once. In the SAME interview she stated that her mother gave her up because her father tried to kill JT when she was an infant AND that it was her adoption that detroyed her [bio] family. Forgive me but wouldn't it be the child abuse that destroyed her family? In the SAME interview she slammed adoptive parents for being too lazy to take their kids to Chinese school AND stated that since their parents don't speak Chinese at home, they will never develop enough competency to be accepted into the Chinese community so she is not sure language school is a good idea. So I'm looking for advice in my FCC newsletter, should I put my kids in the #@%^# language school or not? She stated that she was annoyed that her [adoptive] parents didn't praise her for winning an award for her book when the subject of the book was what lousy parents they are. I mean really, who could have predicted that? I understand that venting might benefit JT. I don't understand how having adoptive parents read such a contradictory interview would benefit the children of FCC. I wasn't put on this earth to be a mental punching bag for KADs.
I am sobbing with thankfulness that someone has had the balls to shine a light on the many homeschooling morons out there. Great idea: Teach your children to be illiterate, just like you! Keep 'em away from those damn godless public schools! They may grow up to be ignorant boobs, but they'll be churchgoin' ignorant boobs!
You rock, woman. Thank you for your candid writing about parenting. Seriously.
I came across this wierd "I wanna be Chinese because I feel guilty for adopting" thing at an FCC event and didn't know whether to be amused or horrified.
I'm okay with the reality that our hopefully-soon-to-be-daughter will be a Twinkie, and I'm also okay with the fact that there are other people who will never be okay with that...
Just as an aside; when I was in high school I dated a third-generation Japanese-American girl. Most American-American girl I've ever dated (even if her grandma still made kick-ass katsu). Not sure why the KADs and their intellectual partners feel its OK to be a completely assimilated nisei but not a completely Americanized adoptee...
Oh - and my favorite homeschool story: had a HS student (I'm an adjunct at the local CC) that wrote the following in a scientific paper:
"Hurricanes happen in marinating time."
I explained that, unless you're writing poetry, you can't use the word "marinating" to modify the noun "time". Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana, time doesn't "marinate" - not an opinion, just a fact.
His reply: "Okay, you da boss, chief..."
Sigh...
AMEN on the homeschooling jerks. And they're all so (wrongly) smug about it, too. There's a reason (many, actually) why educators need advanced degrees.
Sigh. Lorrie. You are on my shit list because your commenters are making me do this.
Not all homeschoolers are smug idiots, and not all educators need advanced degrees and overgeneralization is as wrongheaded as using apostrophes to make thing's plural.
I posted a comment earlier and deleted it, but am circling back to repost part of it.
I'm an a-parent of two teen KADs. I read the KAD blogs, not to enter into debate with them, but to try to understand what has caused the frustration voiced on some of their blogs. I've also been able to communicate via Korean adoption forums with some of those who are blogging.
What they have helped me understand is the source of their frustration - a-parent refusal to acknowledge that racism might be a part of their lives; in the case of Korean adoption, a-parent unwillingness to allow Korea to makes its own decisions about the future of intercountry adoption from Korea; a-parent refusal to acknowledge the depth of their losses.
They don't hate us. They hate our unwillingness to hear, really hear and understand them. And viewed from the things in my life that make me equally mad, I get it.
I know exactly what you are talking about with the uneducated homeschoolers. My ex-husband's first wife (I was second) did not graduate from high school, yet she felt qualified to homeschool her daughter starting in the fourth grade. I had serious worries for that girl's future. Now we're divorced and it's no longer my concern, at least it isn't my concern until the I'm paying the daughter's welfare check with my taxes.
I should probably add that I think that there are people who know what they are doing and do a wonderful job homeschooling. It just so happens that this lady was not one of those people.
Advanced degrees prove nothing. Agreed.
I don't think that states should require X amount of education to be able to homeschool. I wonder if a simple English/Math test though wouldn't be a good thing.
Notice that I specifically said that WHITE PARENTS WHO CONSTANTLY APOLOGIZE TO KADS are the people who piss me off, not the KADS.
I certainly understand KADS who were plucked down in White Land with no cultural support and no acknowledgement of the racism they encountered are angry. Hell, I'd be angry too.
I'm not going to apologize to them for adopting my children, though.
Shit, I forgot to sign into my own blog! Guess I'll publish this anonymously instead of logging in and losing this.
It took a while but I did figure out that some adult adoptee people were just destined to be angry and critical. My favorite time was a discussion where I said that maybe the unhappiness stemed from being thrown into lily white land without support and then having the person insist that the particular country was in fact, very diverse. Even though same person previously said the opposite. Even though I'd been in that place when that person was little more than a babe in arms and still remember thinking "dang! so many white people here." But it was enlightening for me as I realized that some people are just unhappy people and would be, whereever they were plunked down. In large part, I stopped paying attention though I check in to remind myself not to forget issues can exist. Stopping paying attention is not necessarily the best thing but, as you aptly noted, there's only so much pounding on the head a rational person can take.
As for that homeschooling, HEY! take it easy, fellow commenters. We homeschooled both our kids for a couple of years. They were adopted at an older age and needed more time to learn family skills before being tossed back into an institutional setting. I would agree that there are some "different" homeschoolers out there but all homeschoolers are NOT bible thumping illiterates. Lots of them [at least in our area] are educated leftists/buddhist/artists who just want more time with their kids and the ability to travel the world. Now that both of mine are in school, I must confess that the school schedule sure puts a nasty crimp in the travel plans.
Before I saw many homeschooling moms' blogs, one of my biggest pet peeves was grammar, spelling and punctuation errors made by teachers in the notes and newsletters that my kids would bring home. For the most part these were teachers teching language (for example, at the K-6 level), who should know better.
I can overlook such mistakes in someone whose job doesn't fundamentally revolve around writing--like perhaps a computer programmer, or field technician, or even an accountant.
Homeschooling mommy bloggers who apparently cannot spell, or use proper grammar or punctuation, however, fall into the same category as these teachers who send home notes with such errors. I would assume these people proofread what they write, and have the sense to fix such errors, if they notice them. That they don't fix them during the proofreading process illustrates that they don't know better. Gah!
My kids were always embarassed because notes that needed to be returned to school with a parent's a signature came back with my editorial marks. Hey, it drives me crazy to see mistakes like that!
Some homeschooling parents are wonderful but I think of it as like home repairs.
I can handle some of the repairs and some people can even handle the big stuff but you'll make a helluva mess if you try to do what you can't.
So my point - yeah, it drives me nuts when people who have no business homeschooling try to do it. I do think they should have to have some certification to teach from home - not unlike the continuing education credits for teachers.
What drives me MOST nuts is the idea that having hardcore religious beliefs makes some people think they are qualified to homeschool. When did interpreting the bible narrowly mean you are bright enough to educate you kids fulltime?!?!!?
"I just about ***loose*** my mind when I see homeschooling mother’s blog's who don’t seem to know the basic rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation."
Uhm. Isn't it LOSE?
Pretty ironic, huh?
I homeschooled my kids for 18 months and they excelled at their studies whilst home with me. I mean they shot ahead in subjects that really captured their interests. (E.g, my daughter is doing really well in maths, physics and other sciences; my son is also doing very well in the same topics as his sister, but his gift seems to lie with chemistry and he only just turned 11). They are now back in a public school (here in UK - that means a private school), where both are doing exceedingly well.
Anyway, couldn't resist pointing out the spelling error...in light of, erm - you're assertions about homeschoolers.
Um. "Loose" is a joke. That's why it was *loose* and not just plain loose.
I received a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of South Carolina School Of Journalism (which included a class on copyediting) and I do know proper grammar, spelling and punctuation.
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