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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#251

Post by [deleted] »

woodruffw wrote: post #235
matrix87 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average." If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron And seeing the state of California tr…

> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you . I don't…

[deleted]

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#252

Post by encoderer »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #238
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #23

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.

>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that…

This is exactly the point of the article.

I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.

If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.

Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#253

Post by UltraSane »

randerson wrote: post #227
UltraSane wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so. The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things. The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by…

I'd add at least a 3rd group: Parents of kids with sensory (e.g. autism) or behavioral issues that are incompatible with learning at a school.

That still falls under option 1.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#254

Post by r3trohack3r »

woodruffw wrote: post #235
matrix87 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average." If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron And seeing the state of California tr…

> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you . I don't…

I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance.

Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about.

The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something.

I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that:

* every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human

* your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that

I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional.

A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values.

Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#255

Post by wat10000 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #238
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #23

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.

>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that…

My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#256

Post by rahimnathwani »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #240
gonzobonzo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized educ…

  If you really believe this, then sue your school district.
AIUI, California school districts are under no obligation to meet kids where they're at, i.e. if a kid is ahead they don't have to be offered differentiated content or acceleration.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#257

Post by propernoun »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #238
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #23

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.

>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that…

I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.

If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#258

Post by forgetfreeman »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #234
smilebot wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way. Maybe that's not how society thinks? That's one person's opinion.

The well known adage of “buy the cheapest house you can afford in the most expensive neighborhood” is a sign that is what many think. The rat race to make sure your kids are in league with other parents of similar or higher stature is a huge contributor to home price dynamics.

Lol what? I've never heard that adage and it seems like really bad advice. Your neighbors aren't going to cut you a check at any point so what even is this.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#259

Post by williamtrask »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #238
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #23

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.

>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that…

Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#260

Post by floxy »

rayiner wrote: post #161
vel0city wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being able to read the Bible would be a big improvement on say the Baltimore school system, which spends $22,500 per year per student: https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-baltimore-students-... (“According to the 2022 NAEP test, only 10 percent of fourth-graders and 15 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore’s public schools are proficient in reading.”) Literally, madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to…

>madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran

I thought they were just teaching the sounds of the Quran. Like the Pakistani kids don't know any Arabic, and they don't learn to read or understand Arabic. They just memorize and recite the Arabic sounds of the Quran that they've been taught.

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