Ummm… where in the hell do they do this (15 minute lunch, no hallway talking)? That’s terrifying. I thought the Nazis lost the war.
A lot of parents who homeschool, including the ones in this thread, allow their children to interact in non-school social groups of their age. Some of them play sports. Some take theater, art, or dance classes. Some are members of youth groups. Some are in Scouts programs or things like 4H. Parents who think that homeschooling means never leaving home without mom and dad probably should not be homeschooling.
And just so I don’t look like I have an ulterior motive:
-signed, Electric Warrior, who has attended (public and private) schools since age 2
Welcome to Chicago. :rolleyes:
(It’s enforced more in some schools than others, I admit. Sullivan, when my son was there, was pretty hard core about it. About the only student contact he had between classes was random gangbangers whacking him on the head for no apparent reason…silently. Lovely school.)
ETA: And either I remembered wrong or they changed it…I just checked my kindergartner’s schedule and she does indeed have more than 15 minutes for lunch. She has 20 minutes for lunch.
Still not exactly what I was getting at… everyone you meet in Scouts is somebody whose parents would sign them up for Scouts. Everybody you meet in 4H is somebody who would participate in 4H. Everyone you meet in a homeschooling group has highly involved parents. Etc etc etc.
Of course, everyone you meet in a public school is somebody whose parents send them to public school. There’s that to be said against me.
Is there a recess after lunch?
Sometimes. The parents have requested it, and once or twice a week her teacher manages to squeeze it in. We’re lucky, in that this school (unlike the school my son attended) is pretty flexible and has a vocal parent body; we all donate money to have a full day kindergarten teacher instead of a half day, so the teacher is pretty intent on keeping us happy! 
Really, is this surprising to readers? The “no recess” thing has been going on for 20 years now, and it’s still spreading, as far as I know. The “silent in the hallways” I first noticed about 10 years ago, although it may have been going on in some areas before that.
Lots on google, if you’re interested.
ETA: Oh, lol. Check this out. It’s part of an (honest, not satirical) song for teaching “Classroom Management”:
What do you think might happen in the hall
If everyone talked
Not only you, not only your class,
But every class as they walked
Imagine the noise, the rumble and roar
From the gym to the lunchroom and more!
How could anybody learn anything
When learning’s what school is for?
“That’s right - learning’s what school is for - no talking”
As someone with no kids I shouldn’t even be here. I just popped in to point out that it’s … a bit amusing, for lack of a better word, that some parents homeschool because they feel public schools are too secular, and others homeschool because they find too much religiousness in public schools.
We’re doing a combination of A Beka and Time4Learning. It will be very structured: they’ll just have math in the evenings because that’s one of my strengths. My husband is stronger in history/social studies than I am.
I am not a qualified (as in certified) teacher, but I majored in secondary English education in college. I have had enough training short of student teaching that I feel confident in my abilities.
We’re doing it because we have two special needs children that are not being served by our local school system. I hate that term, and I hate using it. Our son is in SPED for one class, and our daughter is getting pulled out of class four times a day to test her blood glucose. She’s missing anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours of class time, depending on how long the district nurse decides to keep her in the office. Up until this year, she tested in the classroom, and had no issues. Now she feels singled out, is under extreme stress, and our son is stressed out worrying about her.
20 minute lunch, no talking in the hallways OR at the lunch table. And it is terrifying.
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Man, when I was in school, we had 30 minutes for lunch (25 years ago) and sometimes, it was really tough to get all the way through the line with a few hundred other kids, find an empty seat at a table and eat your lunch in only 30 minutes. I have no idea how kids can do that in 15 or 20.
But if I were a parent, I’d totally use this to my advantage when taking kids out to eat in restaurants. “Quit your horsing around! I know you can choose what you want to eat, order, get your food, and eat all in 15 minutes at school, so pay attention to your menu and be ready to tell the server what you want to eat!” [/stern mom voice]
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And they wonder why kids today have eating disorders…:rolleyes:
It just goes to show that it is the parents’ invovement in the education process and the child’s life makes the difference, not the school.
I homeschooled my daughter for seven years, first Kindergarten then later, pulling her out at the end of sixth grade. I wish I’d done it earlier.
It’s funny I recall having discussions on this very board about how I was putting her at a disadvantage socially. I’m glad I was right. At 21 she (BloodyL, although she’s more of a lurker) is out on her own with a good job and lots of plans, and LOTS of socializing. She’s a social butterfly. She tested above average across the board on her GED and 24 on her ACT, not bad given she was taught by a high school drop-out! I really loved it and I think she did too. I unschooled. It was totally unstructured and somehow she’s come out with a great love for learning, especially languages.
I don’t think I screwed her up too badly! 
I was homeschooled from 2nd through 12th grade, and I’m now 28. I got my Master’s in Computer Science at 22, so it definitely didn’t hurt my academic progress any. We’re currently homeschooling our 6-year-old, who is technically in K but we are doing a first grade curriculum. Both he and I have late September birthdays (4 days apart), and we didn’t fit well into the boxes that schools like to put kids in.
My son was reading at age 4, almost entirely self-taught via computer, Leapster, Wii, etc. He’s very self-motivated for learning. We’ve been taking it pretty easy with school, letting him settle in gradually. He’s been known to sit down and do 2 weeks’ worth of one subject in a few hours when he’s in the mood. This is balanced by spending most of a day learning to make origami ninja stars…
As a non-parent I’ll echo what Sattua is saying. I think the one great thing about public school is the child can truly become independent of the parent in whom they associate with.
What worries me a lot with most instances of homeschooling I’ve seen is the parents essentially take far too much interest and control of what their children choose to do with their lives. I think growing up is in large part about being able to make your own mistakes. Even if that means little Haylee Riley Smith decides she wants to date the pot-smoking redneck from the trailer park on the bad side of town. I don’t deny there are a plethora of non-school socialization options, but when the parent is the one saying “alright we’ll put you in scouts, or in church league basketball or etc” the parent gets to make the decision about what type of children their child associates with.
A good thing? Maybe, maybe not. I think there is value in being able to interact with people whose parents are divorced, whose finances are in bad shape, who might be living well below the poverty line, who might be petty criminals etc etc. The real world isn’t about getting to pick these little compartmentalized societies that we associate with, real society is all encompassing and its good to be able to associate with all of it.
Also of course the standard disclaimers about nothing being one size fits all and no two things being exactly alike. Obviously for some kids none of what I’ve said applies and I’m sure every doper home schooler only does it for the right reasons. However I will say most of my personal exposure to home schooling has been extremely fundamentalist Christian families doing it to totally deprive their children of any interactions with people who have different opinions. This usually is followed up by four years in an arch-fundamentalist bible college followed by who knows what.
All the kids in my oldest daughter’s elementary school were from the same district. It was all poor, mixed ethnicity, single parent homes. All her friends from elementary school were just like her.
I’m sure it’s not like that everywhere, but the only kids bussed in her school were from a similar poor mixed ethnicity neighborhood.
But come to think of it I never went to school with people from different socio-economic backgrounds. Even back then were were all mostly the same. I didn’t meet anyone different from me in school. I met them in clubs and bowling alleys and church groups. My best friend went to a private school (we weren’t in the same neighborhood; our grandparents were neighbors) and all the other kids were just like her. Middle income, white Catholics. I don’t really think school is the place for meeting people of other social circles but I only have a few to go by.
When it comes to education as with other facets of life, I taught my daughter to do it for herself, not for me, not for a teacher, not for a boss. She sets goals and keeps them. If she wants to know about something she learns about it. She didn’t wait for my approval then, although it pleased her when I approved.
But I taught her that before I really got in to homeschooling her. I will teach her sister the same thing.
I find it simply ridiculous that we can’t be trusted around here to edit our own posts after five minutes.
Did I read somewhere in all this that homeschoolers have their own PROM? :eek:
Really?
I’ve experienced regular-flavour schools, several types of alternative schools, a homeschool collective, unschooling, and finally six weeks of mandatory ‘training’ before I was allowed to take my GED.
I preferred unschooling by far, but I started it late, just a little before my 14th birthday. I’m not sure if I would unschool any hypothetical future kids of mine completely, or enroll them in an alternative school/homeschool collective, at least for a while.
I do think there was a lot of value in it, especially in interacting with people of different ages and backgrounds, and in being able to easily arrange activities together. Our group had kids aged 5 to 15, and we had semi-structured classes focused around different subjects. Parents and family friends with a particular skill (woodcarving, astrophysics, ukulele…) would come in and show us what they did. One of the parents/teachers was a biologist, and we had access to some pretty good lab equipment; another was a singer who led a small choir; another was an ex-competitive swimmer who took us to the pool. Those kind of resources are hard to get for a single family, and that’s where homeschool collectives really come in handy.
When I signed up to take my GED, timed with when my “graduation” would have been if I’d remained in school, the teachers told the class (mostly older adults) outright that they were going to basically provide a high school education shorn of babysitting and busywork. In six weeks. Sigh.