My thoughts on rodents and homeschooling

Here I am, and no--I will not be bringing my children to meet Racer. I don't know how it is at your house, Jill--and maybe your kids are good about taking care of their animals, but mine are not. The frog, the fish, the disastrous dog...it all falls to me. I'd be okay with another dog. Even a snake would be fine. But no rodents. That's my rule despite Ted's pleas for rats for the kids ("I had one, and they're really smart and friendly...") Insert shudder here. It probably is due to the fact that my parents' backyard and neighborhood is overrun with rats. Years ago, my parents hired an exterminator who was very successful. So successful, in fact, that we would find dead rats all the time. Like when we went outside during my eighth birthday to play games and found not one, but two rats; one dead and one in the midst of his/her death throes on the lawn.

This is my last official week of spring term, and therefore, my last week of required math. I am deeply relieved by this. My panic at the beginning of the term seems kind of silly but I was truly afraid that I would not be able to do it. I'm also winding up the second term of A&P. You do meet all kinds of people at PCC; strangely, many of them have been homes chooled. I have three lab partners and out of the 3, two have been home schooled. They are 17 and 18 and while they are lovely girls, they are finding that actual professors are a lot harder than their parents in terms of grading. One of the girls keeps to herself and the other is bubbly and outgoing and I feel very maternal towards her. She claims that she didn't need to go to high school because she was socialized through her involvement in a downtown theater group. She is by turns very mature and very naive. On Friday we were at open lab, studying the circulatory system in a dissected cat, looking at models, and preparing for our lab exam. We were examining a pliable model of the liver, trying to figure out where the hepatic portal vein would be and eventually giving up. She picked up another model and said to me and our other study partner, M, and said, "What is this, I wonder?" M and I looked at each other and he said, "Well, C, that's a penis." The best part is that she actually had grabbed onto the penis and waved it aloft. I am now very suspicious of homeschooling, and the fact that the two top homeschooling texts have eliminated any mention of Darwin does not do the movement any favors. I worry for these kids. Just because you pretend something doesn't exist, doesn't mean that's the reality. -- Emily