Lilek's has an amusing bit on homeschooling today:

and she mentioned “Home schoolers, the religious right. They drive me nuts.”
The home-schooling part I didn’t quite get. There seems to be some who believe that this is a typical day in a home-schooling classroom:
“Alright, Ezekial, Rebecca, Simon, Mary, put away your snakes and come over here for natcheral science. Ezekial, how old is the earth?”
“It’s six thousand years old!”
“That’s right. Rebecca, did the dinosaurs come afore man, or at the same time?”
“Uhh . . . at the same time?”
“No, Rebecca, there were no dinosaurs. You’re going to have to get a paddlin’ for that, and remember: God wants it to hurt.”

Silly Lileks, of course there were dinosaurs! Didn't you ever read Job? What do you think the Behemoth was? Liberal revisionist...

Speaking of homeschooling, this week the proposed new homeschool law in Pennsylvania is coming up for a vote in comittee... Here's the text of the bill (the first 10 pages are the old law and the rest are the proposed new law). Here's a pro-new law website and an anti-new law website. For those of you who haven't heard me talk about this yet, i'm strongly against the new law, for reasons which i hope to write up in a letter today, if i do get the time to finish it i'll post it here. The short version is that the new law gets rid of all the safety nets and although almost all homeschoolers are very responsible, i don't think we want to have a law with no checks and balances because it will abused by non-homeschoolers hiding behind this law. There are a bunch of other problems i have with the law, but that's the biggy.