A Twist of Things to Come

It seems that Darth Sweetums has been having some trouble with Facebook, too, if her article, Facebook: The Serial Stalker of the Internets is any indication.

I think I need to get out of Facebook, to be honest. Pull back some, at least. See, I got sucked into the games, and now I hate it. Plus, some guy with a name similar to someone I went to school with, who turned out not to be who I thought when I accepted his friend request, sent me a message just to tell me I'm pretty. Which is creepy and off-putting, for a compliment. I almost wrote back, "That picture is 20 years old. Now I weigh 400 lbs and have no teeth. I wash myself with a rag on a stick" but decided ignoring it was better than engaging.

Still, I would really like to know how to drop "friends" on Facebook. I know it can be done, I just haven't found the place to do it yet.

Well, I think we finally got Big Boy's school stuff sorted. See, there's this thing called Study Island that is geared toward state testing, with separate sections for each criterion they test. For Wee Boy it's mostly play as you go (they can do the quizzes in the form of games), But Big Boy has assignments there from his classes. He had been blowing them off or not applying himself, so that some of his rankings were not great. It's scaled, so you have to have a certain percentage of the total number of questions correct to get a pass. Since he totally blew off a couple, guessing or not even reading the questions, that meant he had to answer a LOT more questions correctly to get a 'pass.' That's what we did today. Mostly, we caught up on three weeks worth of assignments that he hadn't done, or had done but only in the most desultory manner.

The good news is that he did many of them in game form and ended up on the leaderboards (2nd place for the school, and 3rd place for the state). THAT means that when he whines and calls himself 'stupid' (he's a bit of perfectionist, and tends to focus on whatever tiny little thing makes something fall short of absolutely ideal), I get to say, "Third in the state is not stupid." It really irritates me when he calls himself names -- if it was another child calling him those names, at least I'd know how to deal with it. He's got a lot to be proud of, really.

So... Home schooling. I've come down from the panic. First, it was settling into a rhythm, and getting to feel like maybe I could do it and still do other stuff, too. NOW, I'm actually starting to see how, with the help of a good curriculum the support of real teachers through the virtual school, I can give them a better education. I think they really are learning more, and learning faster.

But I have got to get them in some extracurricular things with other kids. Wee Boy really likes chess, so maybe that for him.