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| The Homeschooler's Wish List | 1. Please, stop asking us if it's legal: if it is — and it is — it's abusive to imply that we're criminals. Besides, if we were criminals, would we admit it?
2. Learn what the words "socialize" and "socialization" may mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means to hang out with other people for fun. Socialization also means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you are talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we've got a decent grasp of both concepts.
3. Quit interrupting our kids at their dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.
4. Don't assume every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.
5. If the homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a "reality" show, the above goes double.
6. Please, stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You are most likely the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you've ever heard. So please go away.
7. We don't look shocked and start quizzing your kids when we hear they're in public school. Please, stop tormenting our children like potential oil fields to see if we're doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.
8. Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.
9. Stop assuming that if we're religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.
10. We didn't go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you, really. It was a very personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. And stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.
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