Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

fast.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 108 posts

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#31

Post by gnicholas »

pnathan wrote: post #22

I was homeschooled: k-11. I have a graduate degree. My sibling has a similar path. The academics I received as a homeschooler were, frankly, probably 90th percentile, maybe more. Yet, simply going to a good school district with good teachers and supportive parents would, in all likelihood, have given me similar outcomes. And now, looking back twenty-plus years later, I don't think that it produced a materially differ…

> tl;dr: don't homeschool. take it from a former homeschooled kid. send the kid to a good public school, please.

This is a bit of a false dichotomy. Wealthy people can send their kids to good public/private schools because they can afford to live places with access. But less-wealthy people may not have the option.

The social interaction piece is interesting, and may be addressed by the fact that there is massive growth in homeschooling right now. It's also easier to connect/coordinate with other families (remote or local, based on interests/age). Not a bad idea for a startup, actually!

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#32

Post by Gigachad »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #25
pnathan wrote: post #22

I was homeschooled: k-11. I have a graduate degree. My sibling has a similar path. The academics I received as a homeschooler were, frankly, probably 90th percentile, maybe more. Yet, simply going to a good school district with good teachers and supportive parents would, in all likelihood, have given me similar outcomes. And now, looking back twenty-plus years later, I don't think that it produced a materially differ…

The glaring deficiency of public school is the inability to train your child's character for most of the day. You hope that the teachers and students have similar values to you. Some do, many don't. I want my children to be honest, thoughtful, compassionate, diligent, respectful, and courageous. These aren't society's values today so I homeschool.

This is why the majority of homeschool parents do it. It’s borderline control freak behaviour if not over the line most of the time. Usually to force some kind of religious beliefs on their kids and keep them away from any kids with other opinions.

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#33

Post by Gigachad »

thrown_22 wrote: post #18

Home schooling sounds great until you start talking to the people who home school. There's always something weird about them. This lady is no exception: >I have been disturbed to follow the ever-accumulating research on cardiovascular, neurological, and immune system harms that can be caused by covid, even in previously healthy people, even in the vaccinated, and even in children. While vaccines significantly reduce…

No post body was provided.

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#34

Post by Eleison23 »

Gigachad wrote: post #32
ARandomerDude wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The glaring deficiency of public school is the inability to train your child's character for most of the day. You hope that the teachers and students have similar values to you. Some do, many don't. I want my children to be honest, thoughtful, compassionate, diligent, respectful, and courageous. These aren't society's values today so I homeschool.

This is why the majority of homeschool parents do it. It’s borderline control freak behaviour if not over the line most of the time. Usually to force some kind of religious beliefs on their kids and keep them away from any kids with other opinions.

People, especially parents, with religious faith do not view it this way. It is not "force" to hand down our faith and inculcate our children with values based on loving God and loving neighbor. Only viewed from the outside does this appear to have some kind of coercivity or violence associated with it. On the contrary, we view this as the most precious gift we can give to a child.

I endured more than my fair share of childhood trauma. Yet, my adoptive parents presented me in church for baptism and the other sacraments. We attended Mass on a regular basis. We were sent to Catholic school and taught to cherish high moral standards for ourselves and our friends. I rejected this all for over 11 years, but I came to see the wisdom and value in such an upbringing. Now I accept the Christian faith voluntarily, with free will; there is no force or coercion or violence involved.

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#35

Post by jph00 »

Hi all. I'm Jeremy, the husband of the author of this post. We really didn't expect to see this get any particular attention -- but I'm happy to answer questions about homeschooling you might have.

As my wife Rachel said in the intro, this post is really about our particular experiences. It's not an attempt to convince anyone else to do the same thing.

Home-schooling is very different to what I expected. There are things today that just weren't available to previous generations. In particular, there's a lot of well-designed adaptive apps and websites that take kids through topics at a speed that's appropriate for them. This has meant, in our case, that our daughter has avoided the extreme boredom that she faced when she was at a traditional school, and is now enjoying her learning much more. It's particularly good for topics like mathematics, where if you start getting behind it can become nearly impossible to make progress, and if you're ahead then you might just zone out.

Also, Zoom is a game-changer. Our daughter gets tutoring in coding from an MIT computer science grad (who also minored in music and teaches her piano too), in physics from a physicist, in art from a professional artist, in Japanese from a native Japanese speaker, and so forth. Her tutors are from all over the world and are extremely diverse. This has been a lot of fun for her, and has opened her eyes to different ways of thinking about the world. Without Zoom and friends, we'd have been restricted to people that are in our local geographic area. We've had a lot of help from Modulo (https://www.modulo.app).

Another nice thing about Zoom is that the vast majority of her learning occurs in a social environment with 1-5 other kids. We've found that this is a great group size, and is more social than most larger classrooms -- the kids are never told to keep quiet, but instead encouraged to have lots of discussion and ask questions whenever they come up. There's lots of diversions to follow whatever the kids get interested in along the way.

I've personally spent a lot of time reading academic papers and books about education and listening to lots of interviews with teachers. There are all kinds of fascinating insights that just haven't been brought into regular schools so far, but we're able to take advantage of in all our daughter's lessons. For example, we use a lot of spaced repetition, and teach her tutors how to take advantage of it too (e.g see http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html).

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#36

Post by matheweis »

pnathan wrote: post #22

I was homeschooled: k-11. I have a graduate degree. My sibling has a similar path. The academics I received as a homeschooler were, frankly, probably 90th percentile, maybe more. Yet, simply going to a good school district with good teachers and supportive parents would, in all likelihood, have given me similar outcomes. And now, looking back twenty-plus years later, I don't think that it produced a materially differ…

It’s rather surprising to me that, despite what was an apparently net positive outcome for you and your immediate family, you would have such a negative opinion of homeschooling.

For the others reading the thread (relevant bits of which are linked in the article) consistently shows that on average homeschooled students perform several percentage points higher on academic achievement tests, and a moreover a majority of studies on social development of show positive outcomes for homeschoolers compared to traditional schools. For minorities the net positives are apparently even more profound; the same article mentions a > 20% increase in academic achievement test scores for black students.

Yes, there are good and there are bad situations in all kinds of school, public and private and homeschool alike, but the data appears to be overwhelmingly in favor of homeschooling when compared to a public school.

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#37

Post by ausbah »

Eleison23 wrote: post #34
Gigachad wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why the majority of homeschool parents do it. It’s borderline control freak behaviour if not over the line most of the time. Usually to force some kind of religious beliefs on their kids and keep them away from any kids with other opinions.

People, especially parents, with religious faith do not view it this way. It is not "force" to hand down our faith and inculcate our children with values based on loving God and loving neighbor. Only viewed from the outside does this appear to have some kind of coercivity or violence associated with it. On the contrary, we view this as the most precious gift we can give to a child. I endured more than my fair share o…

sure it's not coercive or violent in most cases, but that's all you get in a religious household. a child may not like going to church, prayer, the thought of a higher power, etc. but that's all they'll be getting. maybe that wasn't the case for you, but at least in all the cases I know of there isn't really room for deviation beyond a certain bounds

participation in the rituals is mandatory, lack of belief is not optional, and heaven forbid something fundamental about you cross the line (i.e. try being gay or transgender in a religious household). that little word "inculcate" puts it pretty well - indoctrination by forced repetition. you view it as passing a gift along, some bearing the end of the gift view it as torment

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#38

Post by bbu »

wincy wrote: post #29
kasperni wrote: post #17

Outside of the Anglosphere homeschooling is not really a thing [1]. Coming from Europe I've personally never meet anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...

Quoted post unavailable.

>That's because public schooling was initially invented by industrialists as a way to control the populace and get them to be good little factory workers and to avoid rebellions.

are you sure about this? industrialists were adamantly against mandatory school because that pulled the kids out of the factory into the schools.

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#39

Post by koonsolo »

ido wrote: post #30
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #5

Not surprising that the kid of two extremely successful and intelligent parents -- at least technically and academically -- is suffocated by the pacing of public schooling. It's supposed to accommodate the needs of the general population and its standard deviations of nurture and nature. I wonder if this will become a more common pattern for the cognitive elite.

It’s not about the cognitive elite. The mass-education public school system is designed for an average with very little deviation that doesn’t actually fit that many pupils - it’s not a single int stat like in d&d, kids have different capabilities & interests and aiming for some sort of generalized lowest common denominator is going to be a bad experience for pretty much everyone. The only solution IMO is the expensi…

There is another way, and I know they sometimes use it in Belgium: let the smarter kids help out the ones that still struggle with the material. That way they learn how to properly explain things, teach others. Maybe they don't see more material than the other kids, but they sure learn other usefull skills.

Re: My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey

#40

Post by cjbgkagh »

thrown_22 wrote: post #23
whatshisface wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read that, or did you scan for the keyword "vaccine"? It's widely accepted that vaccine-induced immunity wanes over time.

Being raised by someone who has numerous medical issues to the point where they can't function in society any more will not lead to a well functioning adult. She's welcome to raise her kids however she wants. But you should keep in mind that this is very much not someone who you want to copy unless you're also basically an invalid.

It’s very common for very smart people to have autoimmune conditions, you have to take the good with the bad. Thankfully as medical tech gets better we can minimize the bad.
Post reply on HN