Homeschoolin’ — August 22, 2022

John Agliata

7 months ago

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
The Agliata Homeschool Academy 🚌
Hypnosis 😳
Sunburn 🌞🔥

When you tell people you homeschool your children, you typically receive one of three responses:

An enthusiastic: “Oh, that’s so cool!”
An I’d-rather-be-dipped-in-acid: “Oh wow! I could never do that!”
A you’re-one-of-those-weirdos: “Oh… really… homeschooling, huh?”

The percentage for each has changed in the wake of the Great Modern Plague that shut down schools and thrust parents into situations homeschool parents willingly sign up for. We get many more #2 responses these days.

Today, the Agliata Homeschool Academy again opened its doors — by which I mean Boy The Younger’s bedroom door so he could stumble out and grudgingly begin eighth grade. We’ve been doing this homeschool thing for 15 years now, and be “we” I mean a heavy dose of Wifey Poo with some academics and, shall we say, gentle behavioral modifications from Principal Daddio from time to time.

Homeschooling ain’t easy, even when you have a kid as scholastically minded as Boy The Elder. The blurring of the lines between mom and teacher, home and school, academics and play are difficult to navigate for both parents/teachers and kids/students. To say that we have it mastered, even after a decade and a half of trying, would be to willfully and heartily lie our asses off.

And compared to most in the homeschooling community, we’ve got it easy, with “only” two kids. A majority of homeschool families have sports team-sized broods of youngins’ who spill out of conversion vans when they arrive at events like clowns from a tiny car at a circus. Wifey Poo was charged with educating both our boys at the same time for “only” five years, though the last two of those BTE was largely handling his own stuff through co-ops and college classes.

Which isn’t to suggest what Wifey Poo does is easy. It’s not. Far, far, far from it. Most parents know this in the wake of the aforementioned school shutdowns. Though BTE was a smart kid who wanted to do well in school, he was also a royal pain in the ass for a few years because, well, he was a kid. We had more than one come-to-Jesus talk with him, and there were numerous days where I could feel the tension inside the house when I came home from work and pulled the car into the garage — forget walking in the front door.

Yet Wifey Poo has always made it work … and work well. She’s really, really good at what she does, despite the fact that BTY is most decidedly not like his older brother and many times could give a rip about learning anything. Yet she — and to give myself a little bit of credit, we — has never given up. We didn’t set out with a plan to homeschool our kids all the way through school. We merely said “We’re going to homeschool today, and probably tomorrow too.” We stuck with the goal, when all else was insane around us, of “Turning out good young men who don’t leech off society.” So far, so good.

I’m not one of those who hates on the public school district and thinks all kids should be homeschooled. They shouldn’t. Some kids and some parents aren’t made for that, and that makes them no better or no worse than any other parent or kid. Homeschooling simply was right for us. So we do it. It’s that simple.

And that hard.

homeschool

Tomorrow after work, I’m going to be hypnotized. Call it a Hail-Mary effort to cure whatever the hell has been going on in my mouth since November 2020, when COVID came along with a nasty metallic goopy taste/feeling that has been with me every single goddamn day since then.

I’ve been to dentists. “Your mouth looks normal.”

I’ve been to my general practitioners. “Your mouth looks normal.”

“I’ve been to ENTs (ear, nose and throat). “Your mouth looks normal.”

I’ve been to functional medicine doctors, had my wife look in my mouth and invited random strangers to gaze into my open maw to see absolutely nothing wrong.

Finding someone in the medical profession to take seriously what can’t be seen or indicated on a scan or through a blood test is exceedingly frustrating, yet I’m pretty sure that if I don’t find some sort of solution to this situation, I’m going to one day be annoyed enough by it that I’m going to jump mouth-first off the top of the Arch.

Karen the Hypnotist thinks she can help. She’s got lots of examples of uncovering the root causes of medical situations by having the subconscious mind, which apparently knows all, be freed up to talk to the conscious mind.

Listen, do I think this is nuts? Sure, I think it’s nuts.

I also think most of what we now call modern medicine was at one time considered nuts. I think the fact that we can take a few pills because our heads hurt and that our head hurts will reliably go away despite the fact that no one really knows why is absolutely nuts too. We know so very little about what the brain is, how it works and what goes wrong with it that we should be much more open to that which we call “alternative” than we are. “Alternative,” absent the massive financial influence of Big Pharma, offers a lot of people who are at the end of their ropes something approaching hope.

So I’ll go to this session tomorrow, and probably a few more. I’ll let Karen the Hypnotist tinker around with my brain. And hopefully one day, my mouth won’t feel like a rat crawled in it and died.

hyponotized

Calling someone a Redneck isn’t exactly a nice thing to do. I mean, it’s one of the last remaining somewhat socially acceptable racial slurs, but that doesn’t mean it’s a kind thing to call a person. Unless, of course, it’s literally true.

BTE and I went to the Indycar race on Saturday. Well, I should say “races,” because we actually were there for three races and about 10 hours, the majority of which the sun was at our backs.

I learned the lesson long ago that, as a bald dude who shaves his head at least three or four times a week, it’s a wise idea for me to wear a hat outside. I apparently haven’t learned that the sun can torch the rest of my fair-skinned body.

The back of my neck is now an angry scarlet. Wearing a collared shirt to work today has been less than pleasant. Yet will it teach me to remember sunscreen the next time I am in a situation like this? Of course it won’t. I’m a guy, which means there are certain things I am biologically blocked from doing.

Reading directions is another, in case you’re interested.

sunburn

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