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For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

washingtonpost.com

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Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance. Just like in Florida, where teachers now face felony charges for having the wrong book in the classroom (not as required reading, just having it in the classroom). Yup, that's people with power attacking home-schooling for sure.

Can you cite the text of the law which motivates your hypothetical felony?

"Any adult, not just a teacher, who knowingly provides a minor obscene material described in section 847.012(3), Florida Statues, could be prosecuted for a third-degree felony."

> The statute 847.012 [...] also forbids subjects of racial issues and sexual orientation [1]

> School officials in at least two counties, Manatee and Duval, have directed teachers this month to remove or wrap up their classroom libraries, according to records obtained by The Washington Post. The removals come in response to fresh guidance issued by the Florida Department of Education in mid-January, after the State Board of Education ruled that a law restricting the books a district may possess applies not only to schoolwide libraries but to teachers' classroom collections, too. [2]

1. https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/verify/florida-t...

2. https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/02/01/felony-charges-unappr...

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#462
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Very, very wrong. I know numerous homeschooled peers who have advanced degrees, including PhDs.

You know what they say about the plural of 'anecdote'.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your child is coming home in tears every day because other children are mean, and the teachers and administrators won't do anything, and your child is sitting bored through bullshit indoctrination and being harangued for skipping brainless homework to write or make art or do any number of other things, feel free to sit down and tell them how valuable the public school system is, and how their suffering is stupid…

Do the tears eventually end without permanently destroying the child/parent relationship? If so, you might actually be describing something better!

The tears eventually end with your child bringing a weapon to school or going hulk and slamming another kid's head on concrete like that viral meme you probably can remember, then getting suspended, getting put in Juvi, and having their life fucked up even worse.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your child is coming home in tears every day because other children are mean, and the teachers and administrators won't do anything, and your child is sitting bored through bullshit indoctrination and being harangued for skipping brainless homework to write or make art or do any number of other things, feel free to sit down and tell them how valuable the public school system is, and how their suffering is stupid…

The school system has many problems. That doesn't mean that homeschooling isn't 10x worse.

Just because you can point to cases of homeschooling that's 10x worse than the average public school doesn't mean there aren't homeschooling environments that aren't much better, and public school environments that aren't MUCH MUCH worse.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#465
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense. There's too much evidence for me to believe that evolution doesn't happen, at any scale. Evolution is clearly observable and foundational to biology. Whereas Christian creation stories always felt like mythology, sounds human centric and made up. I read stuff like the Epic of Gilgamesh and realized that some stories in the bibles are base…

> The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense. Even from a biological perspective this distinction is not nonsense: couldn't there exist an additional mechanism that is not arbitrary mutation and survival/selection of the fittest, which could be an additionally important for the formation of species and macroevolution? Candidates for such possible additional mechanisms have been pro…

This "couldn't there exist..." is doing a lot of work that I don't understand.

"Couldn't there exist different laws of gravity for big things like planets and small things like rocks, which explains why I've never seen rocks attracted to each other?"

Yes, there could in some alternative universe, but not in this one that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain why you don't notice rocks being attracted to each other.

There could exist some difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution," but not in this universe that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain species.

The entire concept was made up by creationists to try to add a patina of science to their deeply-unscientific beliefs. And the problem with an unscientific world view is that science will never change your mind about things, you'll just decide what science to accept and which to not accept.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your child is coming home in tears every day because other children are mean, and the teachers and administrators won't do anything, and your child is sitting bored through bullshit indoctrination and being harangued for skipping brainless homework to write or make art or do any number of other things, feel free to sit down and tell them how valuable the public school system is, and how their suffering is stupid…

Do the tears eventually end without permanently destroying the child/parent relationship? If so, you might actually be describing something better!

And the juvie outcome is so common that it makes up the most likely outcome from having a bad school experience? I think homeschooling may still be statistically worse

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#467
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People stop talking to their parents because the relationship isn't good, not because they didn't get to take a turn being shit on in public school.

The "your choice to homeschool me harmed me" is point of contention and literally the conflict in some cases.

If your idea of homeschooling is to sequester a child away from all human contact to try and indoctrinate them in some crazy belief, maybe. Plenty of homeschooled kids have homeschool play groups, athletics lessons and other non-compulsory classes which they're free to leave at any time if they don't like their peer group.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private schools achieve that and have more ability to do so than homeschooling teacher as a service does. This model isn't new and had problems before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capturing_the_Friedmans

If I can find a news article about a public school teacher who molested children will you support shutting those down too?

I think your article is less likely to have the investigation beginning with the post office and more likely to have affects of multiple regular people not being OK with something, and being present.

Such involved parents could never let anything happen arguments ignore how these things develop as less involved parents cargo cult. (You can't get much more blatant in a drop in actual involvement than the example in the article.)

These kinds of groups connecting themselves to actual home schooling will erode it by association.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much time does homeschooling take for you? Does it roughly equate to one full-time job? I have wanted to homeschool my kids but I am afraid I would have to quit my job or downshift to part-time. And since they are different ages, I worry that if I taught them all at the same time, the curriculum would average into something too challenging for the younger and not challenging enough for the elder. How do you manag…

Motivated children can easily outpace public-schooled children with 3 or 4 days a week at 3 hours a day. They can be very self-directed, but the trouble with it is they go down rabbit holes and they'll excel at one or two subjects to the detriment of others. My daughter would want to spend 6-10 hours a day on art, but wouldn't want to do her French or math homework. My son just told me that alef (in the Hebrew alphab…

> My son just told me that alef (in the Hebrew alphabet) was the symbol for Graham's number, but balks when I try to get him to memorize his multiplication tables.

I, too, learned about Graham's number when the YouTube algorithm decided that I liked math videos.

The issue with learning like this, though, is that it's called "edutainment," and, while it scratches the same itch in our brains as learning, rarely actually produces learnings.

Ask him in a week what he remembers about Graham's number. I'd be impressed if he recalled much.

Also, if he had a good teacher, that teacher would have been able to push back when he was mixing up concepts. Aleph is not the symbol for Graham's number, rather it is the symbol for Cantor's orders of infinity.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#470
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re willing to share, I’m curious to hear what changed your mind about homeschooling and what made you choose to homeschool your kids.

There were a few things that led to us recognizing and adjusting our biases. But what led us to homeschool ourselves was pretty straightforward. My wife was a teacher in private schools for about 7 years, and once our oldest was ready for kindergarten, we decided that she could either go out and teach other people's kids, or she could homeschool and teach her own kids.

If I could pry further, that doesn't seem a "straightforward" answer to me, it sounds a little pat. Both my wife and I are teachers, and have kids, and we don't have a problem "teaching other people's children" -- that's why we went into teaching.
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