Choices and Exclamations

Summer is time to choose next year's home school curriculum, the most frustrating part of the process (after, of course, the part of getting the kids to buy into it). Back in the dark ages when we began, at a time when few non-missionary families were yet teaching at home, the choices were pretty simple: A Beka, Bob Jones, or the public school texts. We'd supplement with biographies and so forth, of course, but the basics required little time.

Now the choices seem endless and quality is difficult to judge; reviews abound, but which ones are trustworthy, which reviewers share my particular perspective on what makes a good text? As is the norm in all things found in large supply, most of the options are not worthy -- but how to glean the gold nuggets from the abundance of pyrite -- and accomplish anything else with one's limited time?

Reading the hundreds of product descriptions and reviews is excruciating in itself, but many of the catalog writers seem to think that exclamation marks will make their products more appealing. I am tempted to declare a boycott of any catalog that uses more than two of these awful marks on any given page -- but then I find a significant financial savings on something I want, sigh, and continue. Because! these books! are the cheapest! that you! can possibly find!

Argh. It's enough to make me want to send him to public school (where he, too, can learn to use exclamation marks every time he's too lazy to find the words that will create the emphasis he wants.)