I haven't actually seen stats on that, but I do know that my home schooled daughter out-scored her public schooled friends by a significant margin on the college entrance exams. I'm not even sure if even one of her public schooled friends scored high enough to even get into a community college ;-)

In case it went over your head, the analogy is prison = public school. From my personal experience in the public school system, I couldn't agree more. Fellow students = thugs, teachers = guards, principal = warden, cafeteria workers = cafeteria workers.

I have met homeschoolers who have the socialization issues you mention (though having also met their parents I wonder if its actually genetic). But, I've met far more homeschoolers who are properly socialized. People who meet our children often express amazement that they are home schooled since they have the same prejudiced that you are expressing and our children clearly don't fit to their preconceived stereotype. Our eldest daughter elected to attend public school her Junior year (you can read more about her experiences in another post I made below) she was so outgoing and popular that when the yearbook came out she had more photos (and even a half page article about her life!) than almost all her friends put together. The teachers loved her too since they finally had a student who was not apathetic and was willing to answer questions using complete sentences (and actually knew the answers!).

Oh, and I hate to reply to myself, but one other shocking thing was she took a science class and was shocked to learn that her fellow 11th graders didn't know what plate tectonics were. Even with a public school education, how can you possible get to 11th grade without knowing what plate tectonics are? It's not like we live in Texas or some other southern state.

Take this anecdote for what it's worth, but my daughter has been home schooled or attended home school co-ops ever since Kindergarten (Ironically the reason we began to home school her was because of the principal of her elementary school - on the last day of kindergarten he gave a speech in which he pointed out that our children would spend much of their awake hours in the school and so it would be from the school that they would learn their values. I had never thought about it like that, but I clearly remember my years on public school and my wife and I agreed that we didn't want that for our daughter.) Anyway, Junior year of high school she decides that she wants to try public high school. That is fine with us so she starts attending in the fall. By the end of December she had decided to drop out. Here were her findings:

1. The students at public school are apathetic. The teachers were delighted with my daughter since she invariably knew the answers, would raise her hand, and would answer in full sentences. The other students would give as short of answers as possible and had to be prodded. This absolutely shocked her.

2. One day during morning announcements one of the guidance counselors said that she had handouts for some sort of career event coming up and to come by the office to pick one up. My daughter did so. Well it was a shocking experience for both her and the counselor. The counselor informed her that she hadn't actually printed out any of the handouts since in all the years she had been making similar announcements, not one student had ever stopped by to pick one up.

3. She learned that teen pregnancy is much more rampant that she had expected.

By the way, this wasn't some hick high school, but a large school in the suburbs of a large city. The students going here are mainly middle to upper class students.

A side note, even though she only attended one semester, when the year book came out she had more pictures (and even a half page article about her!) in it than any of her friends that attended the full year. She is very out going and vivacious and her fellow students and teachers really liked her, so it wasn't really a surprise. I was mainly surprised that I was so surprised at how apathetic the students are.

The Portland Metro officials have been saying that they have been bending over backwards (and maybe forwards too) to get Google to start building, but they aren't really getting any traction. I'm wondering if Google did a build out in a few initial cities to prove that they are serious, but now they are just threatening to go into other cities to force the telecoms hand to do their work for them.

The main thing is to keep multiple copies in multiple locations as easily as possible. I have all our important files on one drive at home. This drive is auto cloned each day to a different drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. About once a month I copy the newer files to an external hard drive. I take this drive to a different location where I copy the files to a different drive. That drive is also cloned each day using Carbon Copy Cloner to a different drive. In addition, all the contents of that offsite drive are copied to the cloud using CrashPlan. A separate copy is also copied to the cloud using another data backup site. Everything is pretty much automatic except for putting the files onto the external drive and moving them to the other location via sneakernet. I'm sure I could come up with an automated way to do that as well, but frankly I haven't felt the need to do so in all the years I have been doing this.

transliterations? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

If pallets and ice were so revolutionary, just think of the synergy that could be created by combining the two! Pallets of ice!

Along with the right to make choices, we need to emphasize the obligation to take responsibility for the consequences of those choices. You can choose not to vaccinate, but the consequence is you can't send your child to public school (or ideally to any public location, such as the library, though that would be difficult to enforce; hmm, no library card without an immunization form?). If you are willing to accept that consequence then go ahead and choose not to vaccinate.

Some other euro board games that my family likes: Ticket to Ride (any version, though the Nordic one is fun at Christmas), Thurns and Taxis, Pandemic, and Stone Age.

Last night my 17 year old daughter comes home and announces that she wants to learn to code. I'm astonished since I have been trying to get her interested in coding for years. I, of course, ask her why. She informs me in excited tones about the Google giving out stickers and bracelets and a website called Made with Code. But especially stickers and bracelets. It would never have occurred to me, but maybe giving out trinkets is a way to get girls interested in coding.

My 4 year old wants to be a ninja. Thank goodness social conditioning hasn't deterred him from that admirable career choice.

I knew which one was accurate because I experienced the events first hand and I knew that when I read the US papers on the one hand and foreign papers on the other hand, one aligned with what I knew to be true and the other didn't.

This was 20 years ago so I don't know if I could find specific news stories today, but I had been in the middle east and the things the US papers were reporting about the Palestinians were flat out lies. I was frankly astonished. Before this I was naive and believed that newspapers were reputable and reliable.