The Myth of the Socialization Myth

Looking for evidence that homeschooling hinders socialization . . . I can't find anything out there!

I found one real study that was done in 1994, but that study failed to find all the socialization problems that were expected with homeschoolers. The article ends with, "At this point, more research on home schooling is necessary--what we have is inconclusive . . ." They didn't find what they were looking for, so they'll keep trying until they find it, I guess.

I see all kinds of articles from homeschoolers debunking the socialization myth, and posts and message board entries saying that socialization isn't the big problem they say it is . . . so, who are these homeschoolers talking to? What articles are they debunking? Who is the "they" who claim that socialization is an issue with homeschooling?

Dinner

I have trivial, petty things on my mind today. So I'll post about one of them - what we had for dinner.

The kids had a big salad (I chop the lettuce as small as corn, so I can fit a pretty big salad into a normal-sized bowl) and tuna fish sandwiches. For myself, I made a huge salad with lots of minced lettuce and exactly 2 Tablespoons of Annie's Goddess dressing, and mixed it up very well. I added some pinto beans, tuna fish and a slice of soy cheese broken up into tiny pieces. I've been feeling pretty good the last couple of days - good enough that I cleaned out the fridge today.

After our day of snow, we've had two days of mild weather. We even had our windows open!

Snow at last!

And we made good use of it...

You Know You've Had Too Much Physics When...

You dream of math.

The first thing on your mind when you wake up is, What sorts of friction apply to situations of rotational motion? (Answer: the same as apply to translational motion. But I think actually working things out with the numbers would take far more physics than I have right now.)

You think it would be fun if someone wrote a story about a character named Zero, who was just an insignificant figure in the big equation...

You engage in an hour-and-a-half struggle with the physics textbook, emerge with a shaky victory, and turn to writing a blog post about...physics.

Bits and Pieces

I've had lots on my mind lately, but nothing blog-worthy. I've been thinking about a couple of topics that came up on a message board within the last couple of days, trying to sort and clarify my own opinion. Was Rudyard Kipling a white supremist? (No, not in the sense that it means today, although pretty much everyone in his time assumed that white men had a Christian duty to share their knowledge with the uneducated world, and that unfortunately usually got mixed up with their own cultural perspective of civilization.) Is Sunday School a bad thing? (I think I agree with Charlotte Mason that Sunday School should be there for unchurched children, but that children from Christian homes will generally get more out of sitting with their family listening to the pastor.)

We saw Andrew Lloyd Weber's Phantom of the Opera three or four times, we love some of the songs and the story is fascinating. For perspective, we also saw the old silent film version with Lon Chaney. In that one, Christine Daia seemed more of a mindless prop, easily swayed and awed by the Phantom. I couldn't understand why Raiul bothered to save her or what he saw in her.

We also saw Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, the old version with Julie Andrews, and the first of the All Creatures Great and Small set that I got for Christmas. What a great series! It's got it all - fascinating characters, great British/Scottish/Irish accents, beautiful scenery, humor, and educational footage of animals.

Miss M woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Her first words weren't 'Good morning!' but 'My hair is in my way!' Before she even got out of bed. And then she was upset because her nose was stuffy. She was grouchy all morning. I finally put on a ballet movie for her, and it was peaceful for an hour! Maybe she's coming down with something - just in time to be sick when Mr. B and I hope to go out for dinner, just the three of us, for Valentine's Day (she'd be going with us.)

The diet is going fine, I'm enjoying some foods I haven't had in awhile while I was on the raw diet - peanuts, cereal, potatoes, beans, even salmon. I made up a two-week menu so I can do this mindlessly. My shopping lists are prepared, meals laid out, so I have no excuse. There's not really even any cooking required, the most complicated item planned is cubing and microwaving a potato. The basic line-up is fruit before breakfast, granola for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and some kind of properly-combined easy meal with a salad for dinner. It's mostly going okay. I'm starting to realize and accept that a lot of my tiredness is probably due to MVP (mitral valve prolapse) and that no diet is going to "cure" that.

Miss M has expanded her movie favorites. She has a small collection of ballet movies now - Don Quixote, Le Corsair, which is about pirates, Swan Lake, and the Nutcracker with Macauley Culkin, which is her absolute favorite. She also loves our Lassie re-runs, Milo and Otis (although she gets nervous during the more suspenseful moments) and now Cinderella.

To Which Race of Middle-earth do You Belong?

Numenorean Take this quiz!

(from The Common Room)

Diet Change

I've made another adjustment in my ever-evolving search for the perfect diet. I'm going back to the diet I felt best on (the diet outlined in Total Health Makeover by Marilu Henner, which is near-vegetarian, dairy-free, low-sugar basic healthy eating with proper food combining encouraged) but I'll be incorporating some raw foods into it and doing it gluten-free. Reasons for the switch - I'm increasingly always hungry, fruit is expensive, and I'm concerned about my greater risk for diabetes with all the fruit since I had gestational diabetes with my third pregnancy. Without fruit as the foundation of the diet, the tendency is to base the diet on nuts, seeds and avocados - which is too much fat and can make you tired. The other option is to base the diet on vegetables - lettuce, carrots, peppers, cucumbers, etc. And I don't want to live that way.

I'll be starting the day with a piece of fruit, then having a small bowl of gluten-free cereal and soy milk a couple hours later, mega-salad for lunch, and some kind of protein for dinner - either fish or, more often, beans and a gluten-free starch like rice, millet or potatoes. With a side salad.

Oddly enough, the best I ever felt was the last time I was pregnant and the baby was pressing on my stomach so I could hardly eat. Maybe there's a clue there - that it's food itself that disagrees with me. ;)

Miss M

Not sure what the game is, but Miss is playing with plastic food and pretending they're people talking to each other. Here's the snatch I caught:

"Come here. No. No. You may not take your head off. That's not very nice."

(sound of pretend crying)

"Why are you crying?"

"I'm a nice person."

"Yes, I know, you're a nice person. Of course. But you may not take your head off."

New Blogger: Label Lots of Posts

I stole this from a comment that "Mommy Dearest" left at the Beehive:

You can add categories without having to republish your posts. If you open the "edit posts" screen, you can put check marks in the boxes and pull down the "label actions" menu at the top to apply the category labels without even opening the posts. It's handy for applying a bunch of categories at the same time.

It worked great! And I also discovered that, although Blogger only likes to show 25 or 50 posts at a time for editing, you can choose the option to display 300 - and, if you have over 500, like I do, you can cheat by typing in the number of posts you have in the URL so that blogger has to display all of your post titles on one page. Very handy for batch labeling!