Just to be fair, do you really know it was without argument or question? It might be that this kid had been unhappy since the semester began, and his mom urged him to stick it out for the first month or so.
[obscure reference]Maybe it just took a few weeks for his mom to get rid of the plumber to whom she had rented the kid’s room.[/obscure reference]
I would be cautious about conflating the problems of a 16-year-old going to college and a home-schooled student going to college. How many of your students are home-schooled without you even knowing it? I assume this student was your advisee or something? Because I don’t get any information about my students’ pre-secondary education.
I’m neither pro- nor anti- homeschooling, just wondering how wise it is to draw any conclusions from this particular case–though I do understand how it would pique your curiousity!
I would be cautious about sending a 16-yo to college, just because of the age difference; how fun must it be to sit in a class full of cute girls who think you’re a kid? Maybe he just decided to wait a year or so…
Anyway, we are considering homeschooling. I have now been investigating and waffling for about a year (DangerGirl is only 3.5 now). I think it can be great–or not. I’m worried that I would not be willing to work hard enough at it or be organized enough. Or that public school would just be better for her (we live in a pretty nice school district, actually). Then I remember all the bullying I went through, and how little actual learning took place. DangerDad can’t remember ever enjoying school, not even at age 6, while I at least did like some teachers and kids.
I could ramble on for awhile about my fears. But anyway. All the kids I’ve known who were schooled at home were great kids. I’m excited about a lot of the ideas I’ve seen, and think we could have a lot of fun (no, we aren’t religiously motivated). Between me and DangerDad, we have all the education and skills we would need for a long time. We also have a community with many other homeschoolers to cooperate with, and two different independent study programs with many kids and teachers. We haven’t decided what to do, but for us it’s between public school and home; the charter schools around here aren’t very desirable, and the private schools cost more than we can afford.
During my most recent year of college (last year…sigh…I WILL go back someday!) one of the incoming music freshman was a sixteen-year-old who’d been homeschooled. I’m not sure the reasons, but if religion was part of it, her family wasn’t the nutty sorts you hear about sometimes.
We all pretty much adopted her. She’s a really nice girl, very bright, very motivated.
After my miserable experiences in middle school, I am jealous of most homeschooled kids. I don’t think I could allow a child of mine to go to a middle school. You want hell on earth, go to one of those places. “Socialization” my ass.
Homeschooler here. Where I live the regulations are currently being tightened up in a way which will not enhance my kid’s education, it’s just going to be more hoops to jump through as opposed to actually improving things. I’ll probably stay illegal as I don’t want to do distance education and I don’t want to spend weeks writing a curriculum which I know I won’t use as things change so rapidly around here.
It’s going to be easier for a fundamentalist Christian to homeschool here though than it was. It’s the secular homeschoolers who are going to be hit with regulations but I don’t think the Ed Dept realises that.
Socialisation is an issue for my homeschooled kid. It’s not for my younger kid who is starting school next year. But socialisation for P the Elder was an issue in school as well and constant bullying and being different actually didn’t teach him anything about getting along with others. It just drove him in a deep depression. He is homeschooled because he’s peculiar, not peculiar because he’s homeschooled
Academically we can cater to his mix of extreme gifts and learning disabilities in a way which a classroom teacher cannot.
parent centred views are not an issue here. He’s got his own world view and that’s fine.
I don’t have any children, but I do think that homeschooling can have a lot of advantages over public and private schools. Personally, I never enjoyed school. I was physically delayed in my growth and had a hard time keeping up with the other kids because of this. As a male this problem was far worse in middle school; where your social standing was based soley on your athletic ability. Now as an adult of avarage size, I realize that my children may be faced with similar problems and the physical violence I was subjected to. When you combine this with Zero Tolerance policies, Drugs, and the rising intensity of violence, I don’t want my children in such an insitution. Frankly, most public school systems teach at the pace of the slowest student,(I remember being terribly bored) and Private Schools aren’t any better in terms of cirriculum.
What is so wrong with a parent wanting to make a strong impression on the person that their child will become? I'd certainly never infringe on my child's right to form him/herself as an individual. Parents who quash a child's personality to mold it in their own image can be found in mass at public schools just as often as with homeschoolers. I wouldn't mind having an oppourtunity to instill a good strong set of ethics in my child. I also wouldn't mind being AROUND to guide my child as they make those choices on they will become. For example, If my child wants to listen to hip hop/ gangster rap music, fine by me. What they will NOT do however, is run around acting like little thugs simply because they want to emulate a lifestyle. A parent who is around during the day to interpret some of this material has a far better oppourtunity to rasie a good kid. In my opinion, too many kids are learning only from their peers and the television. While socialization is of course important, A good healthy dose of learning to be a strong and self reliant individual is also important. I feel that this can be accomplished better at home.
Prima, why will it be easier for fundamentalist Christians in your area? Do the regulations not apply to religious schooling?
We’re going to homeschool if we have enough money for me to stay home most of the time. As I’ve mentioned before, my best friend and her brother were both homeschooled, and so were a number of our other friends, and they grew up into splendid people. When we get to the childbearing point I’m going to mine Erika for information on techniques and textbooks.
Public school was a horrible experience for both me and my husband- we’ll give our kids the option of trying it if they want, but I think we’d prefer to teach them at home.
Lissa, the regulations will apply to them as well but in the upcoming changes, several religious providers of distance education have been listed as official providers so you can register with them. A lot of fundamentalist Christians were already using those providers but now they will be able to do so legally.
The NYTimes recently had an artilce called “School Away from School,” where the kids satyed home BUT were taught via computer link-up to “cyber-schools” rather than by the parents. Some were private schools - that is, tution was required - but a few were based out of public schools so they were free.
THis sounds like a great idea to me, as the kids are learning from people who are trained professionals in whichever subject they’re covering but the kids still get to distance themselves from high school’s social bullsh*t, which one boy in the article definitluy needed.
My sister-in-law tried for about a year to homeschool her son.She failed miserably. Besides not being terribly well-educated herself, nor auto-didactic, she also had three babies aged 4-1. Her son wasn’t at all motivated and disliked school because he was forced to work. She decided his lack of motivation was the school’s fault and she could do a better job. He was put back into school far behind his peers this year, and it looks like he’ll fail the grade. She’s decided that at 11 he should be mature enough to be responsible for his own homework, which means this lazy (but bright) kid does nothing. Maybe he should be mature enough, but plainly he isn’t, and she’s just letting him slip further and further behind, which is a real disservice to him.
I think there’s a big one operating out of Florida. I can’t remember the name, but it’s accredited and everything. Man, I would’ve been on that like white on rice.
I work in a museum, and often do the school tours. All of us groan when we see that the Home School Association has scheduled a tour.
Most of the times, the parents are with the children, but the kids are usually less behaved than the public school kids who are only accompanied by teachers. I spend most of my time hauling them off of the cases (which they apparently mistake for jungle gyms), chasing after them to bring them back into the group, and trying to shout over them to make myself heard.
On one particular day, I gave tours to 150 public school children, and a group of twenty home-schoolers. Guess which group I had more problems with?
Now, don’t get me wrong: I have had families come to the museum, who declare that they are home-schoolers, in which the children were extremely well-behaved and courteous. It just seems that once they get around large numbers of other children that they go wild. (Again, YMMV.)
I don’t really blame the kids. I think that the opprotunity to be around so many other children is so rare that they want to make the most of it and play. It’s only natural.
As with any parenting, home-schooling only works if the parent is committed to doing it right.
It’s not just homeschooled kids who get to college and leave before the end of their first semester, either. Lots of kids leave home and flip out.
I’ve seen homeschooling both work and go awry. It all depends on the parents. If the parents don’t care, the kid won’t. If the parents drag the kid’s butt out of bed at 7am every day and have 'em hitting the books by, oh, 9, chances are they are going to do as good of a job as a regular school, if not better. (You’d have to try pretty hard, IMHO, to do a worse job than a public school.)
My daughter’s 3 so school is right around the corner. I can already tell that she would be miserable if we homeschooled her. She needs lots of social contact, way more than me or MrSnoopy need. Being cooped up all day being taught by Mom and Dad would make her miserable. The plan is to send her to private school and supplement her education, especially during the summer, with whatever extra stuff we want to teach her.
My former neighbors were poster children for all the BAD homeschoolers. She pulled her son and daughter out of school because they kept getting into trouble, getting in fights, not doing their homework, and claimed to be “homeschooling” them.
She just went to the district, got the materials, and that’s it!
And she never did a damn lesson with them-we know because she was never home at all and her kids were running wild. I swear it was a crack house-we used to hear the older daughter’s screams when she was coming down off of god only knows what.
They ended up defaulting on their mortgage and having to leave. Then they’d sneak back into the house and smoke weed.
It pisses me off-Pennsylvania is supposed to be strict on homeschooling, from what I’ve heard. How the hell did she get away with them, what with the follow ups and tests?
She had to know someone in the district. It pisses me off that she gets away with this, but other people who are sincere get too much shit.
Do you have any evidence that this kid hadn’t been calling his parents every night since he arrived on campus, that he hadn’t been conflicted about being there from day one and perhaps even before he arrived? Do you know if perhaps there was something going on at home – a grandparent dying, maybe or a girl/boyfriend left behind – that was weighing too heavily on his mind for him to want to be at your school? Why presume that because he didn’t stick it out until some date that you think would’ve been more appropriate that he was somehow wrong? Perhaps he was availed of a strong enough self-awareness and strength of will that he knew that he was not in a good place and that he would not find what he needed there in a short period of time, and his mother happened to agree with him or simply facilitated his making a positive affirmative choice to move on/move elsewhere? The presumption that it was somehow wrong for this kid to leave after a few weeks bothers me a lot.
And I have no idea whatsoever it has to do with the fact that he was homeschooled. Do you presume that because he was not part of a traditional education that he was a spoiled, indulged child? That he didn’t learn adequate perserverence skills? That homeschooling created an inappropriate relationship between him and his mother? Is there anything specific to his having been homeschooled which corresponds to his choice to withdraw after only a few weeks, because I’m missing the correlation altogether. Perhaps this kid would’ve stayed if he had been the product of institutional schooling, but there’s no way of knowing that, nor any way of knowing whether it would’ve been the proper choice for him to stay in that case, either. Seems like a big reach for me to look at this story as having anything at all to do with homeschooling.
I also think that socialization is a red herring. There are a lot of resources available for homeschooled kids to interact with one another, and has been noted, they do have friends in their communities, their scout troops, sports teams and places of worship. It’s not as if homeschooled kids are locked in their homes with only their parents 24/7. They don’t spend seven hours a day with a bunch of kids that they haven’t chosen to spend time with, some of whom will be nasty and wretched to them in ways that they would never have to accept anywhere outside of a school environment. I have a hard time viewing that as a negative.
Yes, I was his academic advisor. We met three times a week. We spoke very often. I faciliatated his move, filled out all the paper work, refunded his room an board put up by a family member that semester before his pell came through. He did not have an ailing family member, he did not have a girfriend. And when I called his mother she HAD spoken to him everynight, and as evidenced by the lack of work the kid ended up not doing, he was spending nearly every moment not in class, in his dorm room…
Do other students who are not home schooled drop out, absolutely. College is not for everyone.
I’ll agree with scout troops and places of worship, but many school districts do not let homeschoolers play organized sports through their school. When tried in our town, some players and parents did not feel it was fair that a kid could stay home all day being home schooled and still get the same varsity letter a public school player got, who sat in a classroom all day.
One of the main points of getting through being a teenager in middle school is just simply getting through it. And when you get through it and finish highschool as well, guess what congratulations you made it to adult hood…now you have to use everything you thought you never would in that oh so treacherous of real worlds. not directed at anyone in particular -->
**Tell me how much adversity a home schooler deals with, to intern learn how to cope with it? **
If my answers sound curt this morning I appologize, I’m having a bit of a rough morning…
A child can find her adversaries not just in school but at soccer practice or gymnastics or music study or with the kid next door.
A child can be challenged by a project requiring hours of study and many revisions in the school library or in a public library.
A child can learn to interact with peers not just in school but at the mall or the skating rink or any number of places.
A child can learn patience and concentration sitting in a lecture or building models or bird watching.
The problem is not with home schooling versus traditional schooling. The problem is when parents overpower the child’s natural inclination towards intellectual and emotional growth. This can happen in any environment.
Do some parents home school as yet another way to shelter their children from the real world? I’m sure they do. Do all of them? No.
Do some children skate through public school pulling the bare minimum of grades and never joining any extracurricular activities and having minimal peer interaction? Sure they do. Again not all of them do this.
I think homeschooling can be a viable option for many reasons. Some reasons are better than others and some parents have better organizational skills and are better equipped to teach at home than others.
One of the main points of life, not just middle school, is getting through it the best we can. If, by homeschooling my children, I can better equip them for that oh so mean and treacherous real world then I will pursue that option fully and with no apologies. I have learned in my adulthood that I have choices to make and a responsibility to my children to give them more than ‘just getting through their childhood.’ I plan to teach my children that education is more than sitting in a class no matter where they end up for their schooling!
Plenty of options exist for those who really want to find them.
Adversity… I got out of public school only to find myself bullied and tormented by a kid in the homeschooling playgroup that my family joined.
In school when I was bullied, I just had to take it. There was no adult intervention, no safe place for me to go other than surreptitiously following the yard monitor around at recess and making sure I was in her field of view. It was constant and unrelenting, and there was no escape. My choices were (a) to become small and unobtrusive, stop being myself and hope nobody would notice me, or (b) become a bigger bully than the people who bullied me.
As a homeschooler, I had more options. If this kid was bothering me, I could go hang out and chat with the parents, play with the younger kids, ask the playgroup hosts if I could read some of their books, or just stay home with my Dad if I knew that kid was going to be there (which I did a few times when it seemed that his mother wasn’t doing anything to curb his violent tendencies). I also learned how to talk to the kid and talk to his mother when I had problems, and she did eventually realise that something had to be done that she wasn’t doing.
I think because I had more options and more freedom, and more support and guidance from adults, I learned better ways to deal with adversity. I learned that I had the right to be myself without being tormented, and I learned how to go after what I needed when I was being hurt. After all, the ways I was learning in school have no applicability in the real world-- because if an adult is being ‘bullied’, he has police and other authorities on his side.
You are the type of woman that would bless any students should you ever be a teacher, either publicly or at home. Your depth of compassion for all children should be contagious and communicable. Again, you amaze me with your depth of thought.
I’ll stand up as one instructor and bow, you have summed it all up for me! Thank you. (I do not even know you, and my morning has already been brightened)
Indefatigable - Your answers have also helped me with my view of home schooling. A teacher myself, I understand your viewpoint when it comes to the intricacies of modern day public schooling…If I may quote Alduous Huxley " …Savages they are…pure and through…savages…"
I saw this and thought I was going to get a scolding! Thanks for the compliment - I almost did become a teacher but I was told it wasn’t a ‘real’ profession and to pick something else. I chose Physics and hated it not because I hated the classes but because it wasn’t what I wanted. So the next year, I quit school and went off to work.
See what I mean about parents mucking up their kid’s growth?
Phlosphr…I think you’re being way, way hard on this guy. I mean…sixteen? I’d actually be pretty surprised and shocked if he did stay. How much fun can it be? You’re going to be younger than everyone else there for two more years. As it is, you don’t feel very comfortable as a first year until you’re really settled in. Imagine being sixteen years old…that’s a thousand times harder than just being eighteen or nineteen.
Sixteen year olds aren’t adults. Hell, I’m nineteen and I feel so young sometimes…and sixteen is worlds away from nineteen. You need to be bailed out by your parents once in a while. College is fun, one time in your life where you can hang out, be on your own, meet people, and have someone else pick up the tab (well, if you’re lucky). At sixteen, you’re just not ready for it. Intellectually? Sure, I took AP classes when I was in high school, too. But socially, you’re making huge leaps and strides during the period of adolesence. It’s a really really hard time, Phlosphr. I’m not sure how old you are, and I don’t presume to guess, but seriously, it’s an awkward, strange, weirdass time of life.
