Originally Posted by JonLaw
Originally Posted by Tallulah
Here's the difference: normal kids do a lot of stuff they don't want to do or find difficult at school. They're asked to strive and figure things out, to progress and learn new things, then they go home and are asked to do a bit of physical activity, help around the house with boring tasks. Hothoused kids do this and then go on to a cram school to do more hard academic stuff because more is better. Our kids go to a normal school and sit around doing essentially nothing, so why is it automatically the same as the hothoused kids if we decide it's good for them to get a fraction of the same experience as a normal child gets? Why do our kids get thrown under the bus? Very few of our children get anywhere close to appropriate schooling during school time and have to get it afterschool, so why is it OK for most kids to do appropriate work, but not OK for ours?

Well, because you already lose the entire 8 hours at school.

So, in order to get appropriate childhood experience, you need more hours in the day in order to replace these lost 8 hours of boredom and mindless sitting.

Since you don't have more hours in the day, you have to remove necessary childhood experiences in order to provide other necessary childhood experiences.

People see the other necessary childhood experiences being removed and they get upset because you *are* removing necessary childhood experiences that normally happen outside of school hours.

I think that the solution is to agitate for a much longer day. Perhaps a new legal day that is 32 hours long.

If we can create daylight savings time, we can create the 32 hour day!

Jon, this post is a Thing of Great Beauty.

Thank you.


This is why our estimation of "least worst" for our PG-let was a 20 hour school week and a 4y functional acceleration. (This meant the otherwise fairly gnarly and evil solution that I like to call public cyberschooling).

Because a 32 hour day wasn't going to become a reality for anyone, see.

We weren't robbing her of childhood or keeping her in bubble wrap-- we were walking a high wire trying to preserve SOME age-appropriate and ability-appropriate(-ish, I guess... blush ) life for as long as possible to give our child a childhood, and education, and an adulthood to follow it.


I guess if I examine this through the lens of MLB stats, we did pretty well. LOL. The only reason that a 0.300 batting average doesn't seem so hot to other parents is that they aren't up against Randy Johnson in his prime. We were in a classic no-win situation. Least-worst was the ONLY winning gambit, and it was a long shot anyway.

Oh well.




Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.