Thread split - homeschooling

It's because the core issue underneath this topic, the issue upon which all else hangs, is the question of, "Who is responsible for that child?" An equivalent phrasing is, "Who owns it?" but when speaking of people, the word "own" is not pleasant.

But really, that is the ultimate question of EVERYTHING political. Gun control: who owns it? Taxes: who owns it? Forest land: who owns it? Zoning: who owns it? And on and on and on, EVERYTHING comes down to the question of ownership.

Bye bye.
 
The problems with home schooling is that the parents don't know all the material as well as each individual high school teacher. The idea of a highschool teacher is that they focus on teaching one subject, but I highly doubt that a parent can be the equal to that. I have 2 Bacholar Degrees with Honors and I will be going for my PHD in a few years yet when is comes to history or lit I would be substandard teacher. And before I heard an outburst to this, the reason I came to this theory is through exprience. I used to do the open house for my university, I always saw a lot of people cause I always ran the Robotics section, and admit it robots are cool. When, surprising to me, one semester I met quite a few home schooled kids ranging from 13 - 18 years old. Each one had a similiar story, they would ask "So would I need to do Computer Science/Engineering" where I respond "A good grasp of mathematics and the sciences." This is where things always got ugly, the best of them haven't even done trig and didn't know what calculus was (and this was the 18 year old) to a 13 year old with his mother, who was his teacher, who said "oh we haven't started math yet".

Sorry, but I feeled homeschool kids are the lesser to their public school counterparts.
 
Fascinating.
No, depressing.
The same stories exist for public school students. I taught math at Purdue University for three years (93-96). I saw the products of our highschools. I graded the homework and the quizes and the tests. I talked to the students in my office. I talked with most of the other teachers in my department and confirmed that my students were identical to their students. May God have mercy on us, because it can be so disgusting what the public schools put out. But -- as a group homeschoolers beat the public school students on standardized tests. The first article here, from the Christian Science Monitor, says they score 15-30 points higher than the public school students. The second article here, from the Wall Street Journal, says they schore 67 points higher on the SAT and 1.7 points higher on the ACT. The third, from WorldNetDaily, lays it all out in very straightforward language.

http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/2000/10/10/fp18s1-csm.shtml
http://natural.home.texas.net/wsjhomeschoolkids.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28648
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OIM/is_2000_July-August/ai_103845652
http://www.hslda.org/docs/GetDoc.asp%3FDocID%3D17%26FormatTypeID%3DPDF&e=7764
http://www.diagnosticprescriptive.com/understandingtestingandtests.html
http://www.chec.org/Resources/NewsMagazine/Articles/SATPreparation/Index.html
 
I'm a homeschooler. I left school because of being thoroughly and relentlessly tormented by bullies.

I am now studying mathematics with the Open University, at 14.

So please don't tell me that it won't get me anywhere, or that it's an easy, shoddy, half-baked affair that does not involve struggling for things or learning to deal with hardship. It's not true and I don't appreciate it in the least.
 
Off topic: You have the coolest signature I've seen in a long time, Shotokan. It makes me chuckle every time.

My little girl is 8, and doing division and square roots. At this rate, she'll pull a full grade level ahead next school year, and in time she'll be doing algebra before she's of high school age. Rock on!
 
I was homeschooled, and if/when I have children they will be homeschooled too. I will under no circumstances subject my child to the public school system.

I'd like to point out, that the fact is, parents reasons for homeschooling are excellent reasons over 99% of the time, of course whenever that less than 1% messes up, it reflects badly on all.

When I was in 3rd grade I read at a post-collegic level. In 4th grade my sister - who was in 9th grade and public-schooled - visited, and we had friendly competition in math and English... she couldn't keep up, cried to mother, and I was made to let her win, or even give her answers when she couldn't come up with them on her own. We're taling a 4 grade gap, and my sister could not keep up with me on any subject.

As for how it was done, I was given free rule over my text-books and the amount of time I spent each day doing school-work depended on me, and how hard I wanted to work. Personally, I liked waking up at 4am and having everything finished by 7am when my mother and adoptive father woke up. They did fairly well in all the subjects, however, I made it clear that I prefered learning directly from the text books, and I think that's where my reading level had a great impact.

Socially, I didn't deal with children my age much, I prefered adults, and people with a decent head on their shoulders for the most part. As a result of my preferances, and due to the nature of homeschooling, I was able to enact them and maintain them. There were certainly mistakes my parents made in homeschooling, but even with all their faults, homeschooling for me was nigh infinitely better for me than public schooling could have been. Almost all parents 'could' teach their children better than public school teachers. However, doing it or not becomes a matter of priorities, personal preferances and beliefs.

The only gov't regulation on homeschooling I support is regulation to ensure proper records are kept.
 
I love the idea of homeschooling. If I were smarter I'd do it for my kids. Study after study shows those children at higher levels academically than the products of public school systems. With organized events like proms, athletics, and dances, theres no problem with "social" issues either.
 
I'm homeschooled, about to graduate. I can say it helped me a lot. I didn't really socialize at church so the only time I got to socialize was when until after I was 15 when my parents joined a homeschool co op. After one year I was just fine socializing. Overall I say it helped me a lot. I consider myself to be very smart and this helped me learn a lot quicker than if I had to be taught at the lowest common denominator. (to bad I was never really that great at spelling).
 
Out of all the products of homeschooling that I have ever personally met, oh, none of them have ever been what I would term as being fully functional in society. I have also, as a teacher, seen way too many cases in which home"schooling" involves nothing that can be at all termed as "schooling".
Yeah, there are things wrong with the educational system, but they still have funds to do more then any one person (or smallish group) can do. Especially in the science fields, which I have seen to be severly lacking in most homeschool programs that I have been familiar with.
 
By saying your a teacher that should tell a lot of us where your coming from. The public schools in wisconsin are so anti homeschooling that they are trying to literally make it illegal. I know dozens of kids who are homeschooled and I would say most are MORE socially literate than the products of public schools. The teachers don't care about the kids near as much as making sure their union stays in control of the system. In our local district, they threatened to strike last fall because there wasn't a popcorn machine in their lounge. More and more parents are pulling their kids out of public schools because of the wall being built between the teachers and their "me first" attitude.

We may be facing a strike because their average salaries are "only" 44,500 US$ a year, with NO health costs to the teacher or their families. They simply can't live on that a year. At the last teacher contract meeting, they were whining about how most of them have to take a summer job because they just couldn't live on 44,500. OMG, many of us started laughing at that comment. Public schools are a machine designed to churn out graduates not functioning kids who can deal with even the basics of life.

When I"m able to hire people in my job, I'll take a homeschooled student over a public school graduate nine times out of ten.
 
Well, I am not interested in maintaining my "monopoly" on education. And in Texas, at least, teachers get paid so little that I literally had to move back in with my parents, so please refrain from insinuating that I trying to protect my salary. I don't know how many times in the last three years I have had to decide which bill to skip that month because I didn't have enough to pay them all. In fact, I have to plans to leave this field because I would rather be able to pay my bills and save for retirement, something that Texas is eagerly striping away from teachers.
From a science background, I spend several thousand dollars a year to keep up equipment and to replace lab consumables. I don't know anyone who can do that. If you aren't teaching labs with your science curriculum, then you aren't getting half of what you are being taught. I see it everyday, none of my students understand a thing until you go through it in a lab setting. I don't personally know one homscooled individual that knows the first thing about science. Not one. And guess where industry and the best jobs are going to... science. Most were not prepared for college and out of the females I knew, only one even went to a junior college. None of them are currently able to hold down anything but the most menial of jobs. Not to mention the many local cases of children being pulled out to be homeschooled and not actually recieving any education at all. I am literally talking about seven year olds who can barely read at a kindergarden level.
Does the education system need a compleat and utter rehaul? You betcha. Is homeschooling the answer? Absolutely not. I have seen nothing good come from it.
 
But are you aware of the greater statistics?

I could base my entire view of state or national public schools systems upon my lone personal interactions with public high school graduates. It would be a pathetic evaluation in two respects: (1) they are largely uneducated and anti-social --> conclude "public schools suck"; but (2) my lone experiences do not reflect the whole of public education.

My office hired a high school senior to do filing a couple hours a day. He couldn't handle the job in two respects. One, it was too advanced for his brain to comprehend. And two, he lacked the maturity to get to the office on schedule. But, on the other side of the story, my secretary is a public high school grad (no college) and she's pretty sharp.
 
as a student i am glad i am not home schooled. i go to one of the best schools in the state( and nation for some things) and geuss what? its public.
go do a search on fayetteville manlius high school new york. yea you may see an article on a toilet being blown up but that doesnt bother me, infact no students were harmed, and no one was bothered by it. i plan on being a teacher because of the wonderful interactions i have had with my teachers, and how much i have learned thanks to them. it just might be the area i live in, but the schools here are GREAT. i live next to a family who homeschools/ed all of their children. you know what? i can safely say that they would have benifeted from a public schooling. yes in some cases i can see why one might home school ( distance, quality of schooling, violence) but i will NEVER homeschool my kids. i would rather send them off to a boarding school. and about teachers salaries, yea they get payed squat in most areas, they dont do it for the money, they do it becuase its was they love. maybe you should cut them a break for wanting alittle more money, they are, in a sense, creating the world of tommorow.
 
You know why I have such a problem with it, because in the state of Texas, there is absolutely no regulations on it. No controls. You can say anything you want about what you teach you children and not teach them anything. They aren't even tested. I don't like it because anyone can teach any subject. Just because someone knows history does not mean that they can explain ideal gas laws. Yet under the Texas laws they can teach either. You're right if you are saying to yourself that just because I am certified doesn't mean that I know what I am teaching about when I stand in front of my chemistry class, but hey, at least I took chemistry. That's what certification gives you. The knowledge that you're teacher might at least know something about what he or she is trying to teach. The lower grade curriculum for homeschool in Texas doesn't even require science. Just the three "r's" and good citizenship (can you get more vague?).
Its an open ticket to teach your kids any ol' thing you want, regardless of actual fact or if they might need it. The kids I met who make it into college (increasingly hard with the advent of the standardized tests that they need to pass highschool, which aren't given to homeschooled kids) are not close to being prepared. And yes (to no shock, I do harp about science) they are not prepared for college science classes. Most of them have to drop. When you don't know the basics, its hard to keep up.
I can undersand people who have to homeschool due to geographical reasons, but in America, I don't know any place that doesn't have a school that can be reached.
 
That sounds like public schools! Wow! Students graduate from public schools without knowing squat about anything. And yes, I speak from the personal experience of meeting and interacting with such students. I taught math at Purdue Univ for three years. I know just how little some public school graduates learn.

You can say, "Hey, that homeschool boy over there is under-educated."
And I say, "Ya, that public school boy over there, he's under-educated."
Individual case vary.

But, is it true or not true that taken as a whole, American public schools are poor? And is it true or not true that taken as a whole, homeschooling works?

Example: My daugher is 8. She doesn't just read books, she devours books. She learned a few words and phrases at age 4, and she learened to genuinely, truly, read when she was five. Recall the Clinton presidency: he made a huge, massive, public push for new laws to force public schools to teach students to read by age 8 because so many American 8-year-olds in public schools did not know how to read that we had a national emergency that required the President's involvement.

What shall we make of that national emergency?
 
Great, one example. Forgive me for being underwhelmed. Whereas I can point out several students that I have seen graduate that are not as unmotivated or undereducated as you describe.
How are you going to handle science? Math, English, History. The average person shouldn't have a problem teaching these, and I give you more then the benefit of the doubt. Do you own a microscope? Are you wlling to shell out over three hundred dollars for one? What chemistry equipment do you have access to? What lab space have you access to that will allow her to do the experiments in a safe mannor? Do you have a hood?
 
These days, if I was functional in society, I would be SERIOUSLY WORRIED.

Conformity is not necessarily a virtue.
 
Congradualtions!!! Now you've met one. If we are still going by the individual case bases. Every Homeschooling student that participates in the co-op I go to knew more about science than almost everyone I had met going through Chemistry in a local Community College. I had to explain how I worked most problems in my lab group to people who where "ahead" of me in grade.
 
Back
Top