Posted on 08/03/2013 10:45:53 PM PDT by grundle
If you can’t teach it yourself then you learn it first or outsource it. My daughter is in high school and she works fairly independently of me which she has been doing since upper elementary. It is important to find good resources for them. A lot of homeschool curriculum is written for the student to work independently.
The science that we will be using this year is a AP course complete with 2 weekly lectures and 1 lab by an actual scientist not a science teacher. He has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and MS in Chemical Engineering and a PhD in Limnology. He also have 15 years teaching experience in elementary through college.
You really haven’t researched what you are talking about and you are showing your ignorance of the subject.
You said, “Maybe 20-30% of parents could do a decent job teaching their kids.”
That's not a small percentage. That's actually a fairly sizable percentage of parents, and is a multiple of the percentage of folks who currently homeschool (which is more on the order of 5% or fewer).
Even so, I think you're being pessimistic. In the younger years, the years that are most formative, likely 80% or more of parents could homeschool well. Anyone who can read, write, and do arithmetic would do just fine.
But even as folks move beyond basic subjects, it isn't necessary to be expert in a subject to make sure it's learned. There are plenty of good curricula, especially on-line, that families use. Many of these provide video lectures, plenty of assignments that assist in gaining mastery of the topic, and many even provide access to on-line teaching assistance. Some of these resources are free, others have moderate costs.
And then, homeschoolers can do what they've always done - band together and help each other out. One parent teaches one subject or topic, another parent teaches a different subject.
Even though my son is currently in a Catholic high school, we still obtain math tutoring to help him with more advanced topics from someone in our old homeschool community. In fact, for this year, it's back to the future, as he's run out of math and physics courses at his high school, so he'll be taking on-line MOOCs (massive open on-line courses) from MIT, and his long-time math tutor will function as his math teacher this year.
We know many folks who homeschooled through high school who didn't know advanced math or science, or who weren't adept at advanced history, or languages. By using different resources, these folks managed to put together excellent educations for their children.
But the greatest effects come in the earliest school years. Both my sons went to Catholic school for high school, but both (my older son is starting his sophomore year in college, my younger son his senior year in high school) are readily identifiable as homeschoolers.
Homeschoolers don't need to be well-educated to do the job. They don't have to have a lot of money. They don't have to have specialized teaching knowledge. What they DO have - complete love for the gifts that are their children, given to them by God - is more than ample to accomplish the mission. It does take dedication, time, energy, a willingness to learn, be open, and to sacrifice oneself a bit, but I think that human beings are mostly built like this, and most folks can succeed at homeschooling, especially in the earlier, easier years.
Currently, 85% of children receive their education from public schools. If half of kids were homeschooled through eighth grade (and that's not an unrealistic possibility), and a quarter through high school, our country would be a much, much, much better place.
sitetest
Sounds familiar, Tax-chick.
(Congrats on the Purple Monster! Your kids will look back on it with fond sentiment.)
Regards,
My oldest is on her third car since leaving home; none of them has been purple. Currently she has a silver Subaru with a little truck-bed on the back. I forgot what it’s called. It has a big engine and plenty of room for her dog.
Yeah, but if they have a bed in the house, that’s a room we can’t put other kids in. We have nine children (and two parents) in a 4-bedroom house.
We hope the two oldest boys will go away to college next year.
Well, an education degree is not it.
My best friend is brilliant in math and loves teaching. She got her teaching degree and I asked her if it was any benefit to her. IWO, did it teach her to teach or qualify her to teach and her answer was "NO! You are expected to learn as you go once you get a real teaching job."
My s-i-l told me the exact same thing when I asked her and they both graduated from college about the same time.
As for my friend, she said she'd have been way better qualified to teach math if she had gotten a regular BA or BS in Math instead of a math teaching degree. The teaching degree programs are far too weak in their fields to be useful.
A girl I know, who was homeschooled most of her life, went to high school for a bit to have the classroom experience before heading off to college. She took physics and was so good in the class, that they asked her to sit on the committee to help select the new physics teacher.
This 17 year old girl was appalled at the poor grasp of physics this interviewee had. She knew more of the answers to the questions they asked the prospective teacher than the prospective teacher knew.
This idea of teachers being *trained professionals* is ludicrous. It's simply a myth perpetuated by the educrats.
I have a degree in meteorology and had a good enough grasp of math, physics, chemistry, etc, to teach my kids. For that matter, technically, any parent who graduated high school with these courses under their belt knows more than their kids and is capable of teaching them, as the public education they received should have been enough to qualify them to teach through that grade level.
All they need is the bed, IIRC. I don’t think DSS requires each child to have his own room.
I recall that when my kids were really little, we just put the box springs and mattresses on the floor. They liked it because it was close to the ground and there was no concern about them falling out of bed. Easy in and out.
I liked it because there was no under the bed to have toys get lost under. No cleaning under the bed.
I understand, however, that DSS wants it to be an actual bad, NOT on the floor. Apparently that’s considered child abuse or neglect or something.
Probably, the worse place to look for competent and trained personnel in math, chemistry, or physics is in a government, union-run, godless, and socialist-entitlement K-12 indoctrination center.
As has been pointed out excellent lectures and curriculum are now found ( some of it free) on the Internet.
We have the two teenage boys in one room, the two teenage girls in a second room, and the four younger boys in the third. Anyway, they wouldn’t build a new home now when they’re expecting to move out. Maybe one of the little boys will want to homestead someday, to get out of sharing with his brothers.
Anoreth joined the Coast Guard and discovered the cutter was much more crowded than our house!
Well, it’s to her advantage to be used to dealing with it. I can imagine all those kids who had their own room growing up are struggling with it a lot more.
If the numbers of home-schooled families ever gets beyond about 10%, I’ll be astonished. My vote goes towards more charter schools. I haven’t quite give up on public schools, but from what I read and hear on this forum, a good percentage of them are beyond saving. Public schools used to do a good job. Maybe they still can, but it would take uprooting the teachers unions and the prevailing liberal atmosphere.
I’m happy for them! :D
Thank you, Ma’am!
“Although your points are all well founded, I think there is little doubt that homeschooling accelerates learning.
Because my wife and I work full time, we have sent our children to private Catholic shool. They’ve done quite well. But when I help them with their homework, I am left with a solid feeling that I could teach them the same material in <50% of the time.
It is hard to beat learning at your best pace and having a personal tutor.”
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I think home schooling should be better. My comment was that the statistic provided did not show home schooling to be better or worse than govt. schooling. It is a useless number for either case.
I agree with your post 43.
I was overly simplistic when saying “the stat means nothing”. I should have said “the stat does not prove what it aims to prove due to sampling error.”
In a previous life, I ran a historical site. The home school kids generally came with pens, notebooks and loads of questions.
The public school kids, not so much. If they were lucky, they might have a good teacher who made them behave, listen and write an essay or take a quiz about what they learned when they got back to school.
Indeed, the sample of homeschoolers is “self choosing”, and therefore the results will show a hugely out of proportion success for homeschoolers. The effect is an indicator of the “givadamn factor” in the parents.
But, conversely, I would assert that it does show that kids in public schools are done a disservice by the education they are receiving.
As I’ve stated before, it’s not that the parents who send their kids to public schools don’t give a damn about them,
it’s that those who don’t give a damn invariably send their kids to public schools, to be with those who do.
And that’s why I choose to keep mine home. Away from the “company of fools”.
The validity of that statement depends very heavily on what question the study is trying to answer.
If the question is "Is homeschooling a better system than public schooling?" then yes, the applicability of the numbers is at issue.
But if the question is "Should I hire this homeschooled job candidate or his public-schooled counterpart?" then the stat becomes very relevant indeed.
“If the numbers of home-schooled families ever gets beyond about 10%,...”
Whether it ever does or doesn’t, it readily COULD.
I’m ambivalent toward charter schools. In the short term, they can be a good alternative for kids who would otherwise be imprisoned in poor public schools.
But let’s be frank, they’re a response by the public system to the difference in quality between even mediocre private schools and most public schools, a difference that doesn’t favor the public schools. Without the fact that ordinary private schools are far better than most public schools, charters just wouldn’t exist.
But the presence of charter schools hurts private schools, as it offers, if not quite the same quality as most private schools, a quality that is “good enough,” especially considering the difference in cost.
Yet, even as charters erode support for private schools, the education establishment works to undermine charters through various forms of deception, fraud, and theft. In my own region, charters have enjoyed some success in Washington, DC and in parts of Maryland. But now, the education industry is beginning to successfully start to move against the foundations of the charter school movement that make charters successful. The education industry is starting to succeed in forcing charters to be staffed by union teachers, forcing tenure on them, forcing folks to be certified as teachers (meaning, often, that they have worthless “education” degrees), reining in the authority of charter school principals, etc.
So, as charters move in for the kill on many private schools, destroying the very competitors that forced the education industry to permit the existence of independent, publicly-funded charter schools, they slowly become creatures of the education industry that made the rest of the public school gulag what it is today.
All supported by my tax dollars.
The ultimate solution is the disestablishment of education, the separation of school and state.
How we get there is another topic, as is the question of what parents should do with their children in the meantime.
sitetest
If you mean the complete separation from school and state, you mean the federal government, that’s a worthy goal. My own view if education should be free from Washington dictates and teachers unions dissolved. Are you telling me conservative states like many of the southern states couldn’t run better public schools if not bound by orders from Washington and the educrats? Public schools used to do a good job educating chidren. It’s still possible.
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