It's worth noting the "Two Sigma" problem on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) - "the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment".
Homeschooling hits record numbers
661–670 of 878 posts
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
and what does “covering 2 years of math and reading in 6 months” do for you? getting ready to send your kids to 9-5 grind when they are 12?
I hope they’ll have more options than I did. I never wanted to be a SWE working in social media, but grad school in pure math showed me I wasn’t good enough. A common story.
your kids will have amazing opportunities just because you are obviously a kick ass parent. but I don’t think squeezing two years of math in 6 months will do anything
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded. As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money. By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just…
> Education is expensive and underfunded. Always makes me think of The West Wing scene: > Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of ch…
> The competition for the best teachers should be fierce.
Our nation needs something on the order of millions of teachers. Competition for the best teachers would work great, if you needed exactly 1 extraordinary teacher. Or even if you needed a dozen. But when you need 40 teachers or more per school district... you're going to end up with alot of mediocre teachers, and more than a few godawful ones.
And, I suspect, that the thing not even extraordinary teachers can do is give a shit. Some teachers give a shit about some students, a few give a shit about many/most students, but even those few will falter in a career that lasts long enough.
Any why do they even want this silver bullet anyway, as impossible as it is? Why would you want a trillion dollar boondoggle that can't possibly ever work? The answer for that is downright frightening.
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. This is another argument that "by age" is not the best way to find one's academic or social peers. Some people in 2nd grade should be in high school. Some people in high school should be in 2nd grade. (And, academically, sometimes that's different by subject; some people need to be in 2nd g…
This is one of the most insane comments I’ve ever read on a hackernews story. Age is very much important when finding one’s social peers as a child.
Per HN's Comment Guidelines, I'd assume that Josh meant sorting students by both physical age and subject skill levels. The physical/emotional differences between 2nd graders and HS kids are obvious enough.
OTOH, one of my grandmothers spent her education career in a one room school house, teaching all subjects to grades 1-8. With the right social context, it can work very well.
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#665I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before. We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools. We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise. But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or bette…
How are you thinking about the socialization aspects of homeschooling vs not? I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.
>I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers
Can you perhaps enlighten us and define "socialize" without the use of tautology?
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the parent of a small child, there is a very noticeable difference in social skills that develop immediately as a result of my child being in a daycare interacting with other children of a similar age. Compared to my friends' same age children who are mostly staying at home and babysat by a grandparent. (as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of…
In my opinion, grandparents are the worst. They completely spoil them.
Every human being should have the experience of unconditional, unadulterated love from someone else. But not 24 by 7.
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
My general experience is that homeschool children have self esteem and confidence issues precisely because they've been around 'hand picked' people... forever. They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be.
I watched my kids becoming a median of their classmates. After changing to a private school it was noticeable after a month - different lexicon, mimics, attitude. It's not thick skin they are developing around assholes, it's them incorporating that behavior to some degree. There was nothing I could do to change that - talks, good example, nothing worked, only surrounding change.
Underrated comment because I have seen exactly the same thing. Us as parents don't have as much nurture on our kids as we would like to think.
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
> hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children Unless you can magically guarantee (or have enough money to fund their whole life) your children will never have to interact with "problem" people, they will need to learn to deal with those people one way or another. And it's better to do so in a low-stakes situation like school.
Childhood and youth are anything but “low‐stakes.” The social experiences I faced in public school were far worse than even the worst parts of my adult life. The direction I was headed was one of dark cynicism and misanthropy thanks to the bullying I faced and the lack of care from the adults in the system. When I switched to homeschooling, I began interacting with rational adults (my parents’ friends) and in turn le…
I had exactly the same experience. I was in a public school full of assholes and teachers that couldn't care less about any bullying taking place. Those few years were probably the worse years of my life.
I grew significantly and became a different person when I was moved to a different school.
I still think it taught me a lot about the world and how people really are. I really lost a lot of faith in humanity in those few years and still see the world as cynical in which all people are in it for themselves.
Did it make me stronger? Maybe. But also I wish I could see the world more positively as a lot of people that have been shielded from those experiences seem to do.
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
My cousin homeschooled her kids, who are now finished with college. I know they're capable of using phones (one's a programmer), but I've never seen them pull one out. They're social and love playing board games, and I suspect that comes from their parents. They also socialized with other homeschooled kids, because they were part of lots of homeschooling groups. The kids in public school are there by default; the hom…
this is just wild to make some blanked statement about kids that are homeschooled and screen time compared to kids that go to school based on one example. probably 99.97% homeschooled kids spend more time staring at the screens than kids that go to school (if not more)
You’re doing the same thing, except with even less anecdata
Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
My schools were good, just an middle class CA suburb, but still good, especially our high school. And we had moderately impressive facilities and equipment that we could certainly not recreate at home. And of the roughly 30 teachers I had in high school, maybe 5 or 6 were really impressive - mostly in advanced classes - and they made all the difference. They were very smart, some of them overeducated, and they represented an entirely different type of adult in my life that I desperately needed, given the ultra-hierarchical nature of most family units.