Ah, and some argue that homeschooled children need to learn better social skills.
What a weird way to defend homeschooling. “My parents couldn’t effectively teach me certain subjects, so I had to take classes instead, but because I didn’t go to school I had to do this via online correspondence classes.” Yes, good workaround. Another good workaround I can think of is called “school”.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. Been there, done that. Teaching one kid isn’t the big deal people here like to make it out to be.
Depends on the kid, doesn’t it? Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, I’d find you less of an Il Capitano if you weren’t making such sweeping generalizations based on that experience. But what the hell do I know? I’ve taught several thousand kids over the last 25 years, individually, in small groups, and in large groups. They been from across the spectrum in ability and needs. They been from all kinds of different cultural and economic backgrounds. Many of them did not have English as a first language. I taught these kids chemistry, biology, and physical science, as well as doing tutoring in English and mathematics.
But hey…you have a PhD in Chemistry and you taught a kid once.
I just don’t understand the venom from the people here who are find fault with home education. It does good things for some kids and does a disservice to others. The same thing can be said for public and private school education. There are lots of variables to consider with home education and with classroom education. Why the ire?
It’s only weird I’d you define home schooling as “Mom and Dad being the only instructors throughout their childrens education.”. Those of us who have actually lived it aren’t doing that. Part of what can be great about it is the flexibility. Most of it does follow the route of working out of a book, taking the tests, etc. But you can take classes other ways as mentioned many times above.
Bridget, you really don’t need to condescend to me quite so much. My kids have fun away from home and on their own now. If we homeschool through high school, I will expect them to be quite independent–and given my 10yo’s recent enthusiasm when community college courses were mentioned, I don’t think it will be a problem. I was an exchange student myself and would very much like to see my girls do something similar, or perhaps take a gap year and do some of those volunteer positions in India kids can do now. My ambitions in that area have taken a hit because of my oldest girl’s severe food allergies–once upon a time we had hoped to ‘trade’ cousins with her uncle in Japan once she was 13 or so, and that is turning out not to be possible–but I hope we can figure something out.
I’m not sure you realize how much homeschoolers focus on independence. We’re not raising our kids to stay home forever; we’re raising them to be successful and adventurous adults.
:rolleyes: That is a very funny comment that gave me the giggles. Don’t worry, I have plenty to do.
I think Icarus had a good point early in the thread, though he too was presenting it as a negative.
Institutional schooling is a large part of most people’s formative experience. An apparently blanket rejection of the experience and its assumed values can feel like a rejection of the people.
I, too, am amazed at the level of anger and suspicion re home-schooling. If you cannot fathom that there is more than one effective method for educating a child, then you are no different from the fundamentalists who believe that they have discovered the Truth, and that there is no other route for achieving it.
Public school worked for you? Bully for you. Now let others choose their own path.
This being the Dope, most people here are are intellectually curious and socialize with like-minded people. I’d hardly say we’re the ‘average’. I want to see this same question asked somewhere more representative of the average.
I was enrolled at a “school” at the time. We only homeschooled full time for a few years, since we eventually moved somewhere with schools that weren’t completely useless. “School” didn’t offer calc 2 or statistics, so I took them over the internet in 11th and 12th grade. This isn’t all that rare, and I wasn’t the only student at the school to do it. Again, these are not usually required courses in high school. I taught myself chemistry (another class that not all high school students take) because the teacher was a moron. Every single other student in the class failed the AP test. This is not difficult chemistry we’re talking about. The other students were not stupid either, just merely victims of a teacher doing more harm than good. She was fired after that year.
We discussed taking classes at EPCC or UTEP, but they’re both pretty abysmal* and transportation would have been problematic. The online classes were great because they took less time than a typical class does. Obviously I learned what I needed to learn.
*And of course, that’s where most of the local teachers come from.:smack:
Good point here. The type of person that would be a poor choice for homeschooling is probably not the type that would post on this board, leading to a skewing of results.
Yep, we’re pretty special folks all right. If you’d like to mingle with some more ordinary plebes, you could always find some homeschooling message boards and look around.
At this point I think it’s only us who are interested in this topic, so unless others weigh in that they’re following this with interest I think we’ve hashed most of our differences out.
I’m more accepting of self-selected study participants in sociological studies. They’re the norm really. Everything from focus groups to political polls are self selected. A pollster approaches someone and asks if they want to participate, if they say no, that’s it. Homeschoolers were asked if they wanted their kid to take the test, some said yes, some said no. That’s it. Social sciences don’t have the kind of rigor the hard sciences have, and that’s just part of the nature of the beast. The parents administering the test was a bigger problem to me than the subject selection process.
Maybe the horrid homeschoolers are avoiding becoming data points in these kinds of studies. If so, then we have no data on what’s happening to them and their children. Why should we restrict the rights of those who appear to be doing just fine because of our fears of some unknown, possibly nonexistent or negligible group of crappy home educators? If all the data we have, and it isn’t perfect, shows a positive impact on society(echoing the review’s authors) then why should we sacrifice that because of what may or may not be happening in the gaps in the research?
I don’t think that review supports a logical case for restricting homeschooling. If anything it supports additional support for it and encouragement for home educators to help flesh out the data pools.
Enjoy,
Steven
Actually, I would say that most Dopers are not average. My concerns with homeschooling probably don’t apply so much to homeschoolers on this board as they do to homeschoolers that might post on mothering.com, for example. Or the Huffington Post “Health” section.
Well, it seems you missed the point of my question (which has been answered already by others, thank you). No doubt someone with an advanced degree in chemistry can teach chemistry to a high schooler without a problem. Can you teach literature? History? Sociology? Government/poli sci? Physics? Theatre? Music? Visual arts? Can you teach ALL of those in addition to chemistry?
Since “homeschooling” apparently has a broader definition than I was aware of, of course, the fact that it’s impossible for a single person to adequately cover all of this, is less relevant. (Aside from cases where it really is just a single, unqualified parent trying to teach this stuff. Or trying to avoid teaching this stuff.)
Because I was using myself as an example (parents couldn’t help with 7th grade algebra), and I took Calculus in 12th grade. (Also, if homeschooling is supposed to be more personalized, it’s going to need to account for students who do take Calc in 12th grade. I personally would have loved the opportunity to learn more advanced topics than I did. I just don’t think I could have done so through homeschooling, because my parents would not have had the resources to do better than the public high school.)
BTW, I don’t know if it was different back then, but I took all of the state standardized tests in private school when I was a kid. Maybe it wasn’t “required,” but they did it anyway. On the other hand, the curriculum was not nearly as broad/advanced as in public school (I guess they had a decent remedial program, though), so I was bored out of my mind by 5th or 6th grade, and got transferred to public school in 7th.
I have an advanced degree in physics, and… Yes, to all except Theatre and Visual arts, and even there I’d be able to put together a curriculum as long as it was heavy on studying it (e.g., watching and analyzing plays, or analyzing photographs/paintings) rather than performance/execution (which is often an extracurricular activity anyway). If I was allowed to focus on (say) photography/graphic design I could do a pretty good job with that.
I’d do a better job of teaching history and government than my high school teachers did, too – for example, my history teacher thought the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis were the same thing.
You didn’t mention foreign languages – that’s the one thing I am fairly sure I, and my husband, could not do to the level I would want my kid to learn it.
Of course, it would be extremely time-consuming to do this! I’ve already got some lesson plans for physics, math, music, and literature/writing in my head from other teaching stints I’ve done in tutoring and church, but to really sit down and think about a year-long course in history or biology would take quite a bit of time and energy for me – although I could do it, I’m not sure I would want to. Which is why, I think, a lot of people don’t homeschool as much at the high school level.
I wonder, though, if a lot of people who do decide to homeschool their kids are the sort who think a lot of things are interesting, and are therefore educated in a fair number of subjects.
I disagree. Just because someone knows a subject thoroughly, doesn’t mean that this person is an effective teacher, in this or any other subject. And this is one of the problems with homeschooling…many of the people who decide to teach have no idea how to go about it.
I’m an excellent reader, and I can do just about all arithmatic and even some real mathematics. However, I am a lousy teacher in just about every academic subject. I can teach someone to knit or crochet or how to play FRPGs. When my daughter needed help learning to read, though, I had to get a tutor for her.
I acknowledge my shortcomings as a teacher. Many homeschoolers, though, don’t even realize that they are barely literate and have problems with any math beyond simple addition and subtraction. And yet they think that they are great teachers!
EVERYBODY thinks that they are great teachers. At least, everybody (or a significant percentage of people) think that they are better teachers than people who do it for a living. They especially think that they are better teachers than people who took classes in teaching theory (granted, not all of that information is helpful or decent). Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having societal conversations all the damn time about how teachers suck.
My girls are both on track to finish calculus by 12th grade, and I certainly plan on having them do so. Whether that will be a CC course, a home study course taught by their dad, or at the local high school, we don’t know yet–but there are a lot of options.