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Homeschooling hits record numbers

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Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#521

Post by Melonai »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #463
jfreds wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was homeschooled until high school. I couldn’t agree with you more. The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated. Learning activities with other homeschooled kids is ok but not enough. A tight-knit neighborhood of friends is huge, but not enough. You need to develop a thick skin and a sense of self-assurance. I have no counterfactual of course, but I think much of the social anxiety I…

[flagged]

That was definitely not my public school experience. I've had loads of issues but without public school I probably would be so extremely depressed and anxious, I'm not sure I'd be here today. I wouldn't have lots of important friendships, I wouldn't have my fiancé, and I'd have missed out on lots of experiences that I find were fundamental to shaping who I am now.

And despite all that, school was still really hard on me. I had a bunch of mean teachers, subjects I was miserable at and would cry about (Foreign language French still haunts my dreams...) and of course I was bullied as well for being kind of a weirdo. :) I wouldn't trade it for homeschooling. I know that if I didn't have those experiences at school, I would probably have different experiences that would have shaped me differently. But in the end, I'm still glad I went through all that though.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#522

Post by bentley »

presentation wrote: post #515
parsimo2010 wrote: post #472

A lot of people are offering opinions on homeschooling. I'll throw in one anecdote from my past. I played tennis with a kid who was homeschooled through middle school but was sent to high school so he could graduate with a diploma instead of a GED, because this seems to be something that colleges care about. He was awkward for a couple weeks but basically adapted to high school and we quickly forgot he was homeschool…

My experience though is that every homeschooled kid I met in university over a decade ago was very socially awkward. Not necessarily a problem I guess, they performed fine at academics.

Did you make a point to interrogate all the non–socially awkward people you met at university to determine if they were homeschooled or not? Yeah, thought not.

When I was in university, there were several instances where people who’d known me for weeks or months found out for the first time that I’d been homeschooled, and expressed their surprise. (Surprise that I was “normal,” I guess, and not a social basket case, as the prevailing stereotype of homeschoolers seems to be.) They simply never thought to ask.

In fact there were even a couple of friends who surprised me by turning out to be homeschooled—when I should have known better than to assume one’s schooling background. But when society spends your entire childhood hammering you with untrue stereotypes about what you are (I heard well‐meaning “But what about socialization?” countless times growing up), some of it is bound to stick.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#523

Post by superconduct123 »

meheleventyone wrote: post #254
hereme888 wrote: post #234

The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against…

I mean you’re literally explaining how your home schooled kids are separated from the real world.

Public school doesn't really represent "the real world" for everyone anyway

If you go to university and into a professional career you end up in a different bubble of people than say going into trades

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#524

Post by ecshafer »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #376
ecshafer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups. Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their c…

15+ years ago, that might have been the case. Now, you might find some friends in the 3-8 year old range, but then the kids just...don't do things anymore. In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home. School is quite literally the only soc…

The previous neighborhood I lived in, had around 100 townhomes, very secluded. I never saw kids outside other than walking from the bus stop. However my current neighborhood, which is a development of 15 houses, 11 of which have children. The kids are almost all doing things outside every day. Caveat: everyone in my neighborhood is college educated (mix of engineers, professors, finance, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and some other stuff) pretty sociable, and we (the parents) all seem to independently be anti smart phone, tv, etc. high school age kids do seem to go outside less, but theyre all 2 or 3 sport kids, and pretty busy academically.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#525

Post by bentley »

ikrenji wrote: post #516
andrewstuart wrote: post #67

Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.

so like... a school?

In the same sense that a farmers’ market is like Walmart, sure.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#526

Post by Der_Einzige »

gbacon wrote: post #501
DennisP wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham pointed out that public school is a weird and degenerate microcosm that isn't much like the real social world at all. > I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where not…

Perhaps unlike in some ways, but some aspects of school life persist in so-called adult life, e.g. , jocks, nerds, freaks, party animals, slackers, and teacher’s pets are all still around — now with zeros on the end.

In fact, those sterotypes and type-casts get even more extreme, and often they are enflamed by the very groups that claim to be the most egalitarian.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#527

Post by pfannkuchen »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #147

I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch…

I had a similar experience growing up to what you describe, but in my adult life I ended up living around all upper middle class and wealthy people and I don’t think my earlier experiences have really been very relevant or helpful. So I think it might depend on what the child’s expected adult environment will be like? Like do we need to be around or interact with the sort of people you need to stay away from or watch your mouth around?

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#528

Post by nphardon »

My guess is that this is related to the conservative attacks on education in the U.S., and it's especially insidious because, again I'm guessing, it's mostly liberal minded people who are buying into home schooling in part due to anti-education right wing propaganda. I live in Santa Cruz county, would not be surprised if we had one of the highest home school rates in the country. It feels like a combination of constant anti-education propaganda and the "snowflake syndrome" where parents think their kids are too special to be treated the same as other students in a classroom.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#529

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

ghssds wrote: post #314
usefulcat wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly tradeoffs, but it's not all negative. In my experience, what it boils down to is that home-schooled kids tend to have more experience with adults and less experience dealing with a wide variety of other kids, particularly assholes. When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there…

What happens to asshole kids? Do they become regular adults or asshole adults? Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies? Do they even reach adulthood? Are they even a stable group or were we all asshole kids to some other kids?

In my experience they become regular adults. Whatever made them an asshole is still there, but they've either learned to deal with it or the context has changed such that there's no point in being that kind of asshole anymore. Nobody's perfect, and adolescence is rough in the best of times.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#530

Post by rahimnathwani »

mmcclure wrote: post #517
rahimnathwani wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate The reason for this is simple and not nefarious: - I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types - When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the me…

My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded? Your original point was not that it's "not underfunded," it was that it's overfunded (and substantially so, based on other comments). Your top(ish) comment on this thread to the $28k per student average: I'm saying it's a lot. My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when view…

  Your original point was not that it's "not underfunded," it was that it's overfunded
Here's my original comment. I didn't say it was overfunded: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007623

(But I do think it's overfunded.)

  My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?

  We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it.
That's great! At my attendance area school, two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.

  Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)
If this is for privacy, don't worry, it's all front end code and your location isn't sent to the server. (You can check the network tab or just look at the code.)
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