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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#811

Post by railsgirls112 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #763

The problem with homeschooling is it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world. Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with…

mind sharing some of your experience regarding emotional attachments / social groups?

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#812

Post by thinkingtoilet »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #268
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #34

We are in an age where people who watch a youtube video think they know more than the experts. Being a good teacher is a skill and understanding childhood development is something that requires proper education. I'm not saying there is never a good reason to home-school your kid, but most people who do it are unqualified and from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education.…

What do you consider the "proper education"?

Studying the subject academically in any real capacity. Also, in the US, every teaching degree requires time in a classroom as a student teacher with an experienced teacher as your mentor.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#813

Post by squigz »

csande17 wrote: post #527
squigz wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported. Why would anyone be reported to any authority figure for speaking to girls?

It's pretty standard for middle schools to hold assemblies discussing sexual harassment and healthy relationships, but they don't always do a great job communicating those concepts. Back when I was in middle school about a decade ago, the principal got up on stage with a police officer and explained that sexual harassment is when you talk to a girl and she feels uncomfortable. He then went on to assert that the schoo…

"Don't make people uncomfortable" and your takeaway is you shouldn't talk to them at all. I don't think the problem there lies with the sexual harassment narrative.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#814

Post by ToDougie »

mzi wrote: post #370
jandrewrogers wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate Not true in the case of the US, which famously adopted a culture of universal literacy earlier than the rest of the world. By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history; they took literacy very seriously for complicated historical reasons. Their book consumption per…

> By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today But the states does have among the lowest literacy rate in the west. Less than 80% was considered literate in 2024, compared to almost 99% in the EU (with a range from 94% to almost 100%).

Wrong signal. The problem is demographic. Not being mean, just a fact that a lot of people are illiterate live in the US, but were not born and raised here.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#815

Post by foobarian »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #623

So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons. But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year. We did not like what we saw.…

How did you choose the private school? There are so many choices around us but it seems hard to figure out their quality without actually sending a child there, or having close connections. Wish there was a review forum of some sort.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#816

Post by darknavi »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #557
pie_flavor wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the experts say that algebra should not be taught in 8th grade, and the experts say that guessing at words instead of sounding them out is a better way to learn to read, and the experts say that calc can be replaced with 'data science' which is actually just data literacy, and so on and so forth, I'm not really interested in how the precise definition of 'experts' actually refers to something about 'growing our…

Don't forget the we can't teach the 4 operations in first year of primary school. Meanwhile, all the books from 1950 have them by lesson 2 and school was mandatory at that time. We homeschooled our kid for a few months due to her marvelous classmates, teacher and director, she wrote and learnt more than 4 years worth of study in Switzerland. Unfortunately she is highly sociable and we couldn't give her the constant "…

Wouldn't the best of both worlds be a mixed approach? Let her socialize at school and learn some things and teach her extra at home? Sort of home school lite?

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#817

Post by Scubabear68 »

aaroninsf wrote: post #784
Scubabear68 wrote: post #623

So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons. But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year. We did not like what we saw.…

"millions of parents", "their schools" should be "me", "my school." If your school isn't good, I recommend improving if for every other kid, who didn't pull the lottery ticket of affluent parents with flexible jobs. School boards benefit from parents who care and are competent.

I had to rewrite my response a few time to remove all the curse words.

At least in NJ, you have no idea what you are talking about. Our school laws are completely broken. Just so you know I have spent about 300 hours a year for the past three years fighting with, dealing with, trying to improve our district.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#818

Post by e12e »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #728
e12e wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it. Seems like a bit of a non sequitur? If anything one could hope that a gym teacher would value play and movement over chaining kids to a desk all day?

In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district. Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring. He has been a total disaster because he…

> (...) then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.

I guess the board is at fault here?

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#819

Post by IggleSniggle »

deltarholamda wrote: post #663
spandrew wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make sense to me. We all get better at a talent by practicing it. We make mistake. We watch others. We determine our own preferences for what we like/don't like. We learn, grow. Kids figure it out. How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? You wouldn't get same exposure to the buttload of social interaction and scenarios in a closed system like that.

You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together. And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own versio…

I really take issue with the position that parents have zero influence. Our children attend a "mediocre" public school in our US city. We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results. I always go into it thinking that we are whiny parents talking to an overworked staff, and the results are incredible.

For anyone who is considering homeschooling but isn't sure, there is a real middle ground: actually engage with your huge staff at the public school who are hungry for parent involvement because it seems like the parents don't care and the kids are just there for the babysitting.

Public schools work great, but you do have to remain engaged and be ready to problem solve. It's like homeschooling but you get a whole publicly funded (somewhat overworked but enthusiastic) support staff to accomplish educational goals for your child.

Yes of course schools vary but if approach ANYONE with a combative attitude they are likely to fight back, even if you're on the same side. Approach with sympathy, open communication, and the occasional set of hands in the classroom, and you can get the best for your child.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#820

Post by rahimnathwani »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #812
rahimnathwani wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider the "proper education"?

Studying the subject academically in any real capacity. Also, in the US, every teaching degree requires time in a classroom as a student teacher with an experienced teacher as your mentor.

  Studying the subject academically in any real capacity.
What do you mean by "in any real capacity"? I have read many books and academic papers about education. And I have experimented with some of the things I've learned. Does that count?

Among current K-12 teachers in the United States, what would you estimate is the median number of academic/research papers related to education or adjacent fields that they have read in the past 24 months?

  in the US, every teaching degree requires
A teaching degree is neither necessary not sufficient for effective teaching. There are thousands of ineffective teachers with US teaching degrees. There are thousands of effective teachers without teaching degrees.
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