Free Range Children

Today was my 12 year old's second day of taking the WASL. He was a little mortified yesterday because they made him and the other homeschoolers wait in the office (in front of a huge window looking out on the indoor gathering area) while the students milled around and stared at them, and then the homeschoolers were split up, one to each homeroom, and not allowed to enter until the class had settled in. Talk about a hostile working environment.

He also reports that:
*sitting for two hours sucks, and he's glad he gets to come home afterward instead of sitting for another five.
*it's intimidating to walk into a classroom full of strangers and he had a hard time getting started with the test, but
*so far it's much easier than the WASL study guide I bought him. Also,
*the average middle schooler is far less mature than his five-year-old sister, who previously was his least favorite person on the planet.

Yesterday a friend came over with her six children and our kids had a crazy good time running amok for five hours. Like my own, the kids in this family are imaginative, joyful, and relatively unstifled. You know, unsocialized. Later, as I vacuumed (little bits of paper that somehow are appearing all over my house even though I said scissors at the table only), I was thinking about how cool our kids are. They don't realize that they should be sitting all day. No one has informed them that history sucks and only nerds read for fun and they should communicate solely with people at their precise age and skill level. Despite the absence of roll call and group trips to the bathroom, they have become pretty knowledgable and creative little people.

It's interesting that we (as a society) get so upset about the plight of chickens confined to small cages and left to aimlessly peck at each other, but advocate this type of treatment for our children. I prefer my children and my food both cage and cruelty free, thank you.