Oh no, you've come to the table with uncomfortable historical facts. The angry mob doesn't like facts.

Someone needs to tell appliance manufacturers that NOBODY WANTS THIS SHIT. We have a 2025 Samsung fridge with the "AI Vision Inside" and it's useless. First, it only has cameras in the doors so it really only 'sees' what is in the door pockets. Anything else is a motion blurred image of what went in or out, coupled with some pretty laughter inducing product identification. How many times has any of these features helped us? Perfect zero. No camera in the freezer, and no camera in the middle drawer so you're missing half of the contents right off the bat anyway. What it can see has offered no utility.

Having a tablet on the front was honestly something I didn't care less about either, but we do actually use it for a couple things:
- Sticky notes: What's for dinner each day this week? Need something from the grocery store?
- Ring camera: When someone pushes the doorbell the camera shows up on the screen, handy if you're in the area
- Spotify remote
- Family photos on the background and the screen saver until it goes to sleep

This whole manufactured fear of plastics is wild. Anyone notice now there's always some big thing to fear being pushed every few years? Once something starts to burn out and people don't pay a whole lot of attention to it, there's already a new big fear in the pipeline to exploit. The simple way to know this one is pretty much fear mongering is it is non-specific. 'Plastic' covers an incredibly wide range of materials with wildly different properties, but we're being catfished into fearing 'plastics' generically?

Tell us you couldn't figure out how to set it up without saying "I couldn't figure out how to set it up".

Had a friend who worked at SpaceX from almost the beginning give me a tour of the old El Segundo facility way back in the day (and the Hawthorne facility later as an 'official' visitor a couple times) and I got to see all kinds of really cool rocket stuff I didn't fully understand. But it was amazing looking at everything, the precision machining, how they set up the tooling, and honestly I was really taken aback by the simplicity in the design work. As much as I would have loved to have taken a ton of pictures, I respected the operation and my friend, and kept my phone in my pocket. I did snap a pic of the Model S as a foam block on a steel square channel mockup frame though, and we got a nice group pic in front of Dragon.

Because the graded papers came home with A's? Because every single score and everything else they did was posted to his account? And because little kids are pretty excited to tell you about their day?

Pretty weird to think your not wanting to take a test seriously means my kids are the same.

This is the part we need to talk about for sure. The one size fits all model just doesn't work, and was a driver in our choices.

The school's outright refusal to allow my son to learn independently was the nail in the coffin. One thing that pissed me off to no end, was when my son got in trouble for writing a report. Get this, they were doing a module on how the world is made up of different countries. There's the USA, there's Canada, there's Mexico, etc. That raised an itch my son just had to scratch, so while in class he used his Chromebook to start looking up other countries. So he gets on Wikipedia and starts going down the list, which didn't raise any suspicion until he was on one of the nations that speaks Arabic. The teacher obviously quickly determined he wasn't on the same country when she saw Arabic script on screen, so he was scolded. Itch didn't go away though, so he simply waited until he got home to continue his research. Over the next few days he had researched every single sovereign state and built a Google Doc listing their name, their flag, capital city, and some short snippets about them gleaned from Wikipedia. Over 50 pages, and he was super excited to present it to his teacher and share everything he learned about all these new places. You would think the teacher would have maybe been a little impressed, or at least given him a 'good job' or something. Nope, he got sent to the office and was in trouble because he 'used the school computer for something the teacher did not instruct him to do.'

It is not so bad to try and find middle ground when you have a large class. It is not acceptable to just pull everyone down to the minimum. It is abhorrent to "discipline" a kid for going above and beyond, on their own.

If you met my kids without prior knowledge, you wouldn't pin them as homeschooled. They are in tune with the world around them, know all the pop culture, and have never suffered 'weird kid syndrome.' It's not like 30 years or whatever ago where a disconnect was clear and obvious.

My daughter is in the gym with a large number of girls who are a mix of homeschool and public school, roughly divided into schedule groups by their dedication to the sport. Socially these girls are close, have been friends for years, families are close, etc. The girls hang out in and out of the gym and there are of course many smaller friend groups within the whole. On a personal level I'm continually impressed and humbled by their level of support and caring for each other. It's an incredibly healthy environment.

My son maintains his friendships with the kids he originally met in public school some who likewise went homeschool. He's added friends from other sources, homeschool groups and by friends of friends. He waits for them to get out of school every day, and you always know when one particular friend gets on the bus because he's the first to call. When my son asked if he wanted to go homeschool too, his answer was no. His parents recently split and the home life isn't as calm and stable, so school offers a bit of away time. But realistically they are all what I think are typical pre-teen boys, good kids who are never in trouble despite acting like total goofballs half the time. These are boys who very quickly apologize when they let a cuss word slip. They ride their bikes between houses, go to the park, play video games, go rock climbing or to the trampoline place, do sleepovers, all that.

Time will tell, for sure. But I will say this, homeschool vs. public school today is a completely different animal than when I was a kid. If you would have asked 30 years ago me, I'd likely have agreed with you. Today me, with this being our lives now? Let's just say I have a much different perspective. I think the negative connotation we formed from the early homeschool or private school environments aren't as prevalent perhaps.

One of the biggest concerns was about socialization. For my daughter it wasn't really a question, she is around a large group of some very amazing girls constantly. They never fail to humble and impress me with their support for each other, their genuine level of caring, and their strong ethical grounding. For my son, he maintained his friend connections from public school and made new friends from homeschool groups. The proof was him bringing friends from both groups together and it not being weird.

We have always and will always leave the door open for our kids to go back to public school, and so far both are adamant to continue learning at home. We ask before enrolling each summer and they have yet to hesitate with their choice. My daughter is a sophomore this year and looking forward to college, working on securing an athletic scholarship. She's taking AP courses and we'll be trying to leverage her GPA / SAT / ACT for some help there too.

Pretty sure you know that answer. Taxes stay the same, so we foot the bill for public and homeschool expenses.

I agree, the No Child Left Behind program may have started with good intentions, but the implementation failed. Not to mention the recent political focus on school administration, and here in Texas the concept of teaching our kids to the standardized testing. This may be colloquial, but myself and others I've asked have agreed that despite the push to get more money in teachers' pockets their quality has been heading in the wrong direction. But it isn't fair to point fingers only at the teachers. Our hiring in a completely different field (sales) is telling, we've hired quite a few teachers who threw in the towel. Young and not so young alike, they were fed up with what they outlined as hostile work environments. They would get no support at best from their administrators, some fairly concerning issues upper staff just wanted to ignore or hide. Things like under-reporting fighting or sexual assault claims, feigning ignorance over thefts. Apparently it was an issue for some to get PTO approved, but I don't know the reasoning there.

Started on the homeschool path because of an athlete kid who spent the bulk of the day in the gym. Worked incredibly well for her, grades stayed at the top and honestly her retention and understanding of the material improved. Her little brother always complained about having to go to school, how boring it was, etc. Starting in 1st grade, it was consistent and getting more frequent. The more we looked into his complaints and asked for clarification it was clear he wasn't making up a story to get out of going. He would finish his work almost immediately, and then ask to do things like:

1. Get a book from the library from a grade level higher: DENIED
2. Bring a book from home: DENIED
3. Use the computer while the other kids finished: DENIED

No, they expected my son to either re-do the same work multiple times or just sit there. When he couldn't sit still, the teacher made him stand in the hallway because his fidgeting 'interrupted her teaching.' So we moved him to homeschool as well, and now he's working on finishing middle school a couple years early and we're working on figuring out what his high school AP class schedule will look like.

He loves learning, and public schools simply aren't the place to do that.

Only the weak minded see such things as two simple and opposing options. I'm not one of those people.

You and I both, but suckers keep falling for it over and over again and the money is just too good. I mean look at how hard they're trying to get the world to pee their pants over microplastics.

You're such a brave defender, mommy is so proud of you.

Obligatory "Ackshually" moment.