Making School At Home (Teacher Strike)

HeraldNet ^ | Friday, October 10, 2003 | Julie Muhlstein

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Making school at home Parents become the teachers in makeshift classes

By Julie Muhlstein Herald Columnist

It's time for a switch, Margaret Larsen tells the second-graders.

"Put your brains in gear for math. How do you write the number eight hundred and twelve?" she asks, pointing to a poster tacked up in a Marysville basement. "Read the words, then write the number down. Write the number in expanded notation."

She leans over one little girl in the class of 11 to explain. "If you have 224, you write 200 plus 20 plus four," Larsen says.

Upstairs in the dining room, five students in Ellyn Ritchotte's makeshift middle school are gathered at the table. By the light of a chandelier, they read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," listening to a tape and following along in the Mark Twain classic.

Back downstairs, Lucinda Rowan is in another room helping six kindergartners count and write numbers on pages photocopied from curriculum books. "How many apples do you have in the tree?" Rowan asks.

Excerpt from: http://heraldnet.com/Stories/03/10/10/17598432.cfm

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It will serve the striking teachers right if these parents realize that they don't need the darn teachers and end up becoming full fledged homeschoolers. Unfortanately they don't seem to have any confidence in their abilities, even the "certified teachers", though they might find some if the teachers give them long enough.

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