Bullshit. People were all over Kate what’s-her-face and the Duggars.

“While I in no way intended to make racist or threatening statements, I now realize that they could be interpreted that way.”

I asked the same thing about any person having more than two. I don’t give a flying fuck about their income level, race, religion, etc., beyond how their choices are going to affect everyone else.

I would not call this heroic. I would call it foolish, OctoMom-level stuff.

I bet if this woman was white you would be asking these same questions. But since she is black, you won’t because you don’t want to be seen as racist.

I’m happy for her if she’s happy but this might be a good time to remind people that the WHO recommends 2 years between pregnancies so that a woman’s body can fully recover from child birth.

You didn’t wonder how she plans to support those children. Or if she had ever heard of birth control.

Actually, a really good potter should have a decent understanding of thermo, and a background in geology/materials chemistry couldn’t hurt either.

When were you ever left largely on your own with your peers every day? There was always a teacher, and I was always only ever allowed to interact when instructed to do so.

If this essay had focused on how her kids are getting great math and language arts education, I’d be less critical. Instead, she focuses on her OB, nature school, going outside for two weeks, and mindfulness.

Parents like the author (ie rich, college educated ones) are engaging in selfish behavior on both fronts. They are removing students who are well supported at home from school. Students who are well supported at home are typically better students than students who do not have support at home. Classrooms with a higher…

Yeah. This, exactly. Deciding that your children don’t need a normal, well-rounded education because you didn’t is selfish; limiting your child’s future possibilities to the sorts of things you want them to do might work great in some cases but if the kid ends up having different plans for themselves they might be…

Students who have significant home resources bring more to the classroom than they “take away” in the form of my attention. Not a universal truth, but a reasonable generalization.

Homeschooling is another of the unanticipated consequences of Brown vs. Board, like private academies and charter schools. It turns out that well-to-do white families were more than happy to destroy the public education system rather than share with others. Now they get to complain about how bad public schools are,…

In a strictly selfish sense, for affluent families with highly educated parents, I could see homeschooling as a net good for the child. As a teacher myself, I mourn the loss of students who have decent support systems to the general classroom. The damage removing students who have great advantages does to everybody…

this is weak. I use physics every day. We cancel each other out, so what’s your point?

Everyone knows when you breastfeed for an extra 18 months, that’s where the physics knowledge comes from.

I’m not receptive to this idea because whether schooling works for parents isn’t the point. The point is to educate children. And given the relatively short shrift paid to what her children get out of this arraignment (they socialize fine! If they dont want to be inside, they don't have to be!) I think the focus is in…

I would hope that you have integrated what you’ve learned in physics and biology into your understanding of the universe, and the tools science gives us to evaluate information, at an intuitive level. You don’t have to be a physicist of biologist to gain from understanding why and how things we interact with every day…

Hooray, another bit of discourse in which “normal” equals “people with way more money than us.”