Homeschooling looking more and more attractive

I was running late for an 11:30 tee time.  No time to prepare my own breakfast or to sit down for a drawn-out feast at the local coffeeshop, so I decide to take the high-speed approach at McDonald's drivethru.

The order is simple enough, Big Breakfast©, Egg McMuffin©, and a medium coffee.  "That'll be $5.60, please pull up to the first window."  Thinking to save trouble of handling change, I pull a ten dollar bill from my wallet, grab 60 cents from the dashboard change tray, and hand them to the rotund young man wearing a rumpled blue-and-white paper hat.

He hands back a quarter, a dime, and a penny: 36¢!  I groggily accept the change and drive to the next window.  At the actual food-delivery window, I pause to consider the contents of my hand as I'm about to return the coins to the dash tray.  "Wait a minute, what's this?!  Thirty-six cents?!"  A critical mass of brain cells finally gels, telling me 36¢ can't be right.

The change from $10.60 on a $5.60 purchase is $5.00.  A solitary fiver.  The whole idea is to simplify the exchange.  As an altruistic consideration, the establishment gets to keep precious dollar bills for its heavy transaction volume.  Did Joe Money-Window guy assume I gave him $6.00, in which case, 40¢ is the change and he meant to give me quarter-dime-nickel instead of a quarter-dime-penny?

Making it two booboos for the price of one.

The transaction recovery process begins.  I inform Juanita Food-Window girl that I paid $10.60 and should be getting back $5.00, not 36¢; she's a young Hispanic and it becomes clear I've given her too much information in English.  She calls over to her supervisor, a wiry, gravel-voiced white woman who looks like a NASCAR fan.

"Maybe he thought you were giving him a tip," the supervisor says without smiling, at least not that I can notice.  "Yeah, right," I say.  And this weekend, he's coming over to meet my parents.  What meds is the supervisor on?  Eventually, I get my $5.00 and return the 36¢ to the supervisor—nonetheless doubting the store's books are going to balance at the end of the month.

Normally, after such encounters, I'm struck with a profound sense of disappointment in the mental functioning of my countryfolk.  Which then segues to an easy indictment of the prevalent K-12 (mis)education system: known euphemistically as the public schools but more accurately termed—because the government funds and runs them—the government schools.

But my days of ranting are over.

Besides, you can't fault the Hispanic chick for being verbally uncomfortable with transaction recovery.  Do I put down my Chinese laundry guy because he can't discuss the latest sports news?  And it's quite possible Joe Money-Window guy was new, or his cash register was set in "random-number generator" mode.  Finally, the supervisor may have been kidding after all.

Whatever… Like Thumper in the movie Bambi, "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."  So I'm going to say something nice about educational alternatives, particularly, home schooling.  A friend pointed out an Associated Press story in the Chronicle, the other day.  Don't remember the headline, but the gist was homeschooling is up!

The following paraphrases the story:

After reading this short piece, I went to the National Center for Home Education research web page and read through a few articles.  Not only are standard batteries of academic tests showing homeschooled kids excel relative to government and private school counterparts—one study showed a four-grade mean-scholastic achievement advantage by the ninth grade!—, they even socialize better.

Obviously the image of blank-faced ragamuffins cowering in the corner of a tarpaper shack while their parents scream Holy Scripture at them is, for the most part, inaccurate.  People homeschool for a variety of reasons, probably the least of which is to raise blindly obedient little Xians.  Indeed, the general purpose seems quite the contrary: to raise children who can think for themselves.

"Think" being the operative word.

As for the improved socialization, I mention to my haircutter what I've read about homeschools, and she tells me she has a customer who homeschools.  "The kids get out all the time, go on field trips together, interact.  Parents trade expertise with one another, too, so the kids are often not stuck in a single home learning from a single 'teacher.'"  Maybe a better name for home schooling is "community alternative schooling."

Anyway it's a winner.  From a freedom-lover's perspective, every home-schooled kid is another natural opponent of government tyranny or blind obedience to mindless authority of any kind.  It's a shame homeschool families—like private-school families—are stuck paying a monstrous amount of tax money to the compulsory decadent system.  They're paying twice.  It's not only a shame, it's thievery.

We must stop dumping on the homeschool and private-school alternatives.  One thing's for sure: 100% of all homeschooled kids know how to make change.