Posted on 08/10/2009 4:53:45 PM PDT by achilles2000
WHAT THE HELL???
That ran my blood pressure WAY HIGH DAMMIT.
You left out book reports. Lots and lots of book reports. When I was in school, book reports had a written component, AND an oral component. But you weren’t allowed to read your written report for the oral component. You had to go without anything to read, or use ONLY ONE 3x5 card to jog your memory...with a few key words written on it.
Also, we had lots and lots of grammar, punctuation, and sentence diagramming.
Then there were weekly vocabulary tests. every friday we were tested on a list of 25(?) words that were givin out the friday before...or was it mondays? Memories are fading fast.
That’s about it. But there were enough study halls and quiet study time at the end of each class period that if you tried hard you should’ve been able to get 80-90% of it done at school. If you screwed around, talked, and had a good time, then you had a hard time finishing it all up.
Ok, I got calmed down. That was infuriating.
Now. What is “whole language”?
The risk to the ‘at risk’ youth is obvious. Great Leader MUST soon appoint a homeschooling czar to issue mandates and regulations for all children, especially those who are being diminished by the pedagies and bell-curves of the past.
Their mom and dad are children’s first, natural and best teachers.
Yay!
State run schools is like an unqualified contractor delivering an inferior product under a no-bid contract.
There is a homeschool academy in our area, They went to school from 8:30 to 12:30 Monday thru Thursday. It was just wonderful, they went to school with 20-25 kids in each class but there isn't a discipline problem. If you don't want to be there it's the parents responsibility to figure out what to do.
Congratulations!
“Their mom and dad are children’s first, natural and best teachers.”
Absolutely right...
You are right. Someone needs to step in to protect the self-esteem of the government school students and their parents. A few rgulations will “fix” that right up...;-)
Whole language discards phonics as the primary method of teaching reading and replaces it with trying to recognize words as a unit, guessing, being creative, etc. It is just as bad as the math you saw and is why relatively few government schooled children can read well or read for pleasure.
By the way, none of this is the children’s fault. The parents are to blame for allowing educational malpractice to be performed on their children.
“...when will the government start to implement in public schools what homeschooling has already demonstrated to work well?”
This really wouldn’t close the gap. You are right that if the schools used phonics and correct approaches to teaching math that the gaps would not be so large, but they would still be very significant. The reason is that teaching in schools is structured on a factory model. Homeschooling is a tutorial model. Even under the best conditions, government schooled children would not be able to catch up because the homeschooled children get far more individualized attention (including customized curriculum) from the people who love and know them best.
Homeschooling of children with learning disabilities is growing very rapidly. Parents have figured out that our highly trained education professionals are warehousing their children while collecting a lot of extra money).
I’ve heard of children being duct taped to chairs and shackled on buses.
Here is a site for a national organization for homeschooling children with learning disabilities that you might find interesting: http://www.nathhan.com/
Hooray for you!
Bear in mind that homeschooling is a marathon, not a sprint. In particular, it isn’t a “school” model of instruction in the home. It is a tutorial method.
And another thing - don’t sweat the small stuff (and almost all of it is). Just about any curriculum consistently used will work. Children learn sometimes in spite of us. In fact, they will often teach themselves more on their own than if we teach them - provided we have given them the right basic skills, materials, example, and values.
Too many homeschoolers are insecure because they imagine that if they aren’t brilliant educators that their children will fall behind children of similar ability being educated by the government. This is a ridiculous worry, but almost all of us have suffered from it at one time or another.
Get active in a coop or support group. Go to homeschool conventions and bookfairs, and stay close to the experienced homeschoolers you know. If your children have been in public school, be sure to involve them ASAP in homeschool activities so that they can develop a new (age-integrated) “peer” group.
I can tell you from experience that there is a socialization problem in homeschooling. No, it’s not the children - it’s the parents. All of us have to go through the process of getting all the nonsense we absorbed in school out of our heads so that we can understand how different and delightful homeschooling is. There is no substitute for staying close to experienced homeschoolers who can help you through the novice stage.
Best of luck!
By the way, in church the public school parents are often uncomfortable around homeschool parents because they suspect in their heart of hearts that they are the “junior varsity.” Insecurity and ego make people do strange things. Don’t be surprised if you are on the receiving end of unjustified hostility...
The thing I would be most afraid of is lack of competition.
I remember when I was a kid, what drove me most was trying to outdo everyone else in the class. everything was a race or a contest with me. Finish my assignment first. Get the most right answers. Get the most attention on my oral report. Have the most attractive science report...yada yada.
wow, I can still remember putting in the extra time to make sure all my sketches in my 9th grade biology lab reports were WAY better than everyone else’s. I remember taking great pride in having my 9th grade algebra homework assignment finished before the teacher even said “class dismissed”. I started working on it the minute the teacher gave out the assignment and ignored the rest of his lecture. That was lotsa fun, let me tellya. such glee and pride as I slammed my pencil down and yelled out “done!”
If I was homeschooled without any other students to compare myself to, i would’ve gotten bored out of my freaking mind.
There was one particular assignment I vividly remember as being especially difficult for me. I didn’t finish first, or second or even third or fourth. It really got to me. That was a math assignment in the 6th grade. The teacher made each of us write down each and every prime number from one to a hundred, and to prove that every NON prime number was in fact not a prime number. You weren’t finished until you had it perfect. And the teacher wouldn’t tell you where your mistake was. He just said “nope, still not right”. Then hand it back to you.
That assignment was a major blow to my self esteem. Extremely discouraging going up to the teacher and hearing that same thing over and over...”nope, still not right”. But boy did I learn how to overcome. Major life lesson learned right then and there.
I learned to read with McGuffey’s Readers. (a great resource)
Been an avid reader ever since.
“Their mom and dad are children’s first, natural and best teachers.”
I’m really glad to have had some other really good teachers along the way.
For my own kids, who are in public school, I try to teach what I can, and find teachable moments everywhere. But I am really grateful that some things are handled well enough by the school. I think the main thing is to realize that I have the ultimate responsibility for my child’s education, and anything the school misses or spins the wrong way, I must correct and/or take up the slack.
Those institutionalized children who are academically successful are likely 100% “afterschooled”! The institution is doing nothing more than sending home a curriculum, administering tests, and grading projects! It is the parents and child who actually doing nearly all the hard work in the **HOME**. In fact, the time spent in the institutional school actually **retards** the social and academic progress of children with committed parents. It wastes a ton of their time. These kids would do better if the school mailed the curriculum and textbooks to their home, and only saw them for testing.
wintertime, I was thinking of you and this point you promote when I was reading the report which is the subject of the thread.It just appears that parental involvement in education is what tells the tale - and anything which dilutes that is a negative. I found myself wondering how the data might be defined which would tell us how much of the performance of public school students is controlled by parental involvement - as you put it, "afterschooling." It just looks like homeschoolers match up with some subset of PS pupils whose parents are similarly involved in their education.
My other reaction to the data presented was that maybe the perspective changes if you look at the hole in the donut - instead of saying, "parental education doesn't make much difference, only between 85 and 90 percentile," you could say that it makes a substantial difference - between 15 and 10 percentile - in the number of students who are better academically than your kid.
My granddaughter spent a year in an elementary school which had a slogan, "where excellence begins." I snort when I see it, because my granddaughter was reading before she ever set foot in a school. And because her mother was Phi Beta Kappa and her father has a PhD. "Excellence begins" in elementary school? Hardly! Already too late by then, pretty much.
Good point. In a large high school the number of children who are better academically could be fairly large. This difference could be very discouraging to those who are in the 85%.
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