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Homeschooling hits record numbers

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Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#851

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

programjames wrote: post #814
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors. Yes, you need 5x as many teachers. But you don't find 1 in 5 are at the level of a median professor. You should actually expect more than 1 in 5, given they require less vocational training. There is something fundamentally wrong when you move from tertiary to secondary education, but it isn't an issue of supply and demand.

[flagged]

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#852

Post by jackvalentine »

chii wrote: post #828
switknee wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the issue with merit pay is if it's tied to simple metrics like grades, those metrics will get inflated without raising the things those metrics were meant to measure.

but grades that are external to the school could be used as the metric - something the school cannot tamper with themselves. Grades like "international baccalaureate assessments" or some sort of university entrance exams.

Now the school will do everything possible to convince their crap students to leave before those exams!

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#853

Post by snerbles »

dmje wrote: post #704
snerbles wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise. State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.

No, I totally get it. If you're home schooled maybe you get out to see a few kids, go do some lessons in a forest classroom or whatever. All good. But it's still not the dynamic, varied (sometimes uncomfortable) environment of school classrooms, corridors, playtimes, etc. Again, to re-iterate, I don't want kids to be uncomfortable as a norm, but bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions - finding your frien…

Ah, yes. The "normal people" canard. It's very tiresome. I refer you to a prior comment of mine and the ensuing chain from the usual HN homeschooling merry-go-round a year ago [0].

--

>> You can also learn outside of school, too.

> As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.

---

>> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.

> It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.

> Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42249295

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#854

Post by AlexeyBelov »

codingdave wrote: post #451
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…

> increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students. You really might want to explain that further. At face value, that sounds like parroted right-wing rhetoric.

He is a real rightoid based on other comments. HN disappointed me today, since you're the only one who noticed, others silently tolerate this behavior.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#855

Post by lanfeust6 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #827
lanfeust6 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is a cheaper alternative to private school That depends. Often it means one parent stays home to educate and watch the kids, otherwise, someone else has to, and that usually costs money. If a wife otherwise would bring home a decent salary, then it isn't cheaper.

I literally said in my comment, for people who don't make so much that the loss of one spouse income is so much more than the cost of school

You edited your comment, and also, this:

> e.g. most people

Is false.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#856

Post by 5upplied_demand »

totallykvothe wrote: post #321
5upplied_demand wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insightful how they said segregation and financial means and you immediately went to racism. There is certainly some level of segregating the children from families who have the means to "dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children" and children from families that don't have those means.

You can't use the word segregation wrt people and then pretend it's surprising or unreasonable when someone assumes you're talking about racism.

They used the phrase "If you can afford it." The charitable assumption would have been that the segregation was tied to income.

I never said it was surprising or unreasonable, I said it was insightful. Your comment is further digging in on that point.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#857

Post by triceratops »

oceanplexian wrote: post #172
connicpu wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.

I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.

Well I guess SF public school students don't have a human right to get good teachers either then.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#858

Post by 5upplied_demand »

gosub100 wrote: post #781
bgnn wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you define here is isolation from the real world. There seems to be a misunderstanding of your understanding of misunderstanding.

Children's world view is shaped early on. They shouldn't have to suffer just because poor, violent, should-have-been-aborteds are legally required to go to public schools. Children should experience carefree happiness at least once, in their formative years so they know happiness is possible.

> They shouldn't have to suffer just because poor, violent, should-have-been-aborteds are legally required to go to public schools.

Yikes! Good thing these people, whom you so clearly despise, will cease to exist after school and will never have to be dealt with in regular life.

I guess the rise in homeschooling is not surprising when we openly view our fellow civilians as inherently poor/violent and shouldn't exist.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#859

Post by tristor »

programjames wrote: post #817
tristor wrote: post #245

As somebody that suffered through public school as a gifted kid, I wish I had been homeschooled. Almost everything positive that happened in my education was because of family, not due to the school. School was hell on earth for me, and I imagine it's the same for most other "neurodivergent" kids who are high IQ. Given what I know from my own kid, there's no surprise to me why more people are opting to home school. F…

It is in fact the best outcome, because education is just a ranking game, and it's not like you will end up ranked lower in your school. Also, since the point of education is to help people learn, your calmer presence and pro-learning attitude may rub off on the worst students, and their chance of ending up jobless and in prison will go down!

It might be the best outcome for society, but it's not the best outcome for the people. I experienced severe violence directed at my person for most of my life and it caused lifelong trauma. I was further punished for defending myself, expected to just allow people to harm me. During school I was beaten many times, had bones broken, was stabbed with a pocket knife, and had numerous other things happen. Unlike the kids from the bad homes who exacted that violence against me, I didn't get my trauma from home I got it from school.

I have a 176 IQ, I'm now a highly paid professional who has made significant contributions to both open source software and to the invention of technologies that power the cloud. Obviously things worked out for me regardless of my circumstances. Most of the kids I went to school with are dead, in jail, or homeless drug addicts, so my presence certainly didn't fix that. If forcing me to be with them in school saved just one of them from a life of crime and drugs, was it worth forcing me to experience torture for no reason of my own making for my formative years? I would say no. Society is not more important than the individual, you must balance individual and social values against one another without taking either into preference.

I have no problem with spiteful bullies ending up in jail or dead after school, ultimately. It seems just and karmic.

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