Unasked for advice

Shopping happened. At the conference that is. I bought what I needed, made relatively few impulse purchases, and most importantly has a lovely time doing group therapy with my friends. We didn't go to any sessions, though, just shopped and talked. We made a brief attempt which consisted of looking through the program and giving a cursory glance at the session titles, but truly, there was nothing that spoke to us.

Between the three of us, we have a combined count of well over forty years of homeschooling. And being a vaguely opinionated bunch, unless there were sessions titled, "How to go Back to Egypt for the Sixth Time and not Want to Poke Your Eye Out" or "Making Homeschooling Fresh for Year 20" or "My Friends Have Had an Empty Nest for Five Years and I'm Still Doing First Grade: A Lesson in Creating New Friendships," well, let's just say nothing spoke to us.

I did bite my tongue just a wee bit inside the vendor hall. I admit to being an unredeemed eavesdropper. This makes it very difficult to not listen to the various vendors answer the questions of those who were visiting their booths. Now, I don't want to call the motives of the vendors into question, but the truth is, they were selling products. If you are selling something, it's usually because you think it's the best... whether it is or not. I came really, really close at various points to butting into a conversation to render my opinion, which was often of the variety that indicated the much less expensive option was far better.

My friends and I laughed that what we should have done was to bring a card table and set up our own little booth. We could title it "The Old and Crotchety Opinionated Homeschoolers who aren't Selling Anything" and just offer advice. You bring the sample curriculum and we weigh in on its real merits. And since between us we have encountered an extremely wide range of learning challenges and successes and possibly experimented with almost every curriculum out there, we do have a basis for our opinions. We even found a nice corner to set up shop in. Probably we would have been nicely asked to pack up shop, though. Oh well. It could have been fun.

Comments

Donna said…
Perfect! If you ever do set up that card table, I want a seat, too! LOL
I am not sure I could have showed as much restraint as you did though. :)

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