This "shouldn't" be surprising. Smart people seeing a wider perspective, seeing the limits of mass-schooling and top-down curricula, seeing other social challenges, and seeing a better option? I live in Seattle; there's a reason it's one of the top metros with per capita private school enrollment and if it weren't for tech incomes, I'd expect homeschooling and homeschooling collectives to thrive. Comments here about…
I live in the Seattle metro, and tomorrow morning is the first day of class for our homeschool co-op, where I'm teaching software engineering to high schoolers.
The same logic applies to teachers, and can be applied against your own question. As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you. I agree with your sentiment however, i just dont think its a powerful retort.
>>> a = 3.0 >>> b = 3 >>> type(a) == type(b) False The right answer they were looking for was 3, not 3.0. Adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct. They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding. You didn't give the right answer and…
As someone who (almost!) has a PhD in mathematics I'm going to have to call you out on this point. You are thinking like an engineer and talking about precision, but this is mathematics, not engineering. We make no distinction between the "real" number 3, the "complex" number 3, and the "whole" number 3. The number 3 lives in each of these universes as the same object (so to speak) because these sets (whole, real, complex) numbers are included in one another. Writing 3.0 is a representation for 3 just as 2.9999... is a representation of 3. Perhaps the bigger question we should be asking here is what was the purpose of all of this discussion? I've seen such petty treatment by teachers all the time and it always discouraged me from pursuing math until I met professors in university who actually tried to teach us something interesting and beautiful about math. This question could have led in that direction actually with a discussion of different kinds of numbers but unfortunately many math teachers in the US are not capable of this, or are too discouraged by the other craziness in schools to have the energy for such conversations.
As someone who once heard, in 11th grade pre-calculus, that pi is a rational number equal to 22/7, I cannot be so surprised that many parents would choose to homeschool their children. Most parents have no idea what is going on in their childrens' schools.
One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
One thing I've never understood with public schooling: How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis ? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
> How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis?
Multiple members of my wife's family are teachers in the local public school system. From what they have told me: they don't want to be in that place. Parents demand it of them, despite their strong attempts to push back and say "hey this one is your job as the parent to solve". So that's the reason in at least some cases, although probably not all.
One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
That's like half your job as a parent: teaching your kids stuff ( the other half being: keeping them alive). You are THE most qualified person on the planet to teach your own kids anything.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service. We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively fai…
Or private equity owned schools. Imagine how bad product they could effectively deliver. The would not even teach humans walking with dinosaurs... As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
> Here are some things I struggle with at age 32: > - Social awkwardness and anxiety > - Difficulty in forming IRL friendships > - Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em? > - An abiding sense of detachment from reality I'm the same age and have the same things, and I went to traditional school K through university. Idk if that has much to do with how you were sch…
This is due the author presumably having a really high IQ, not homeschooling. He would feel the same way with regular schooling.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service. We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively fai…
Or private equity owned schools. Imagine how bad product they could effectively deliver. The would not even teach humans walking with dinosaurs... As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
> As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
As compared to what again? Remind me how good government has been doing.
Somewhat tangential, but a big part of math proficiency is varied repetition (eg, Kumon's practice sheets where you repeat the same operation with different numbers) and you can almost just make these yourself now.
I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell. Private schools are outrageously expensive. Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.
I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level.
Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.