Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The majority of my teacher/homeschool mom friends also say that their education degrees helped as much as a can of beans when homeschooling their own kids.
My education degree helps about as much as a can of beans in the classroom. The thought processes I developed getting that degree are another story.
I was referring to experience. However, education is necessary to educate others. You can't do much if you are ignorant.
Originally Posted by Hasdrubal do they get in contact with other kids besides occasional trips outside? Anyway, I tend to believe that homeschooling usually happens within poorly educated parents, so they better educate themselves before ruining their kids' future.
Why would stupid uncaring parents even care to have their kids around all day?
Actually, the demographic for homeschooled families are middle class, one parent usually has a degree, the students are one grade ahead on average for elementary schools, four grades ahead by the 8th grade, testing higher on SAT/ACT's, grown kids are reported to be happier, have 100% employment rates, higher percent attend college, a higher percent complete with a degree, drug use is lower, suicide is lower, teen pregnancy is lower and guess what....they have healthy social lives.
You might get an occasional nut job who wants to have a dangerous contorl of their children but that is near non-exsistant...a much lower percent of parents than the national numbers.
Homeschooled kids do get out. The whole point of homeschooling is to offer your children a more hands on learning than public schools can teach. Instead of reading about dolphins, they will go and SEE them, instead of watching Cosmos in science class to learn about the universe, they will go to a planitarium and use a telescope.
Same goes with the social aspects. Instead of being limited by same age classmates, homeschooling children have the amazing opportunity to learn and grow with a large age group from ages 1 to 100. ANOTHER amazing thing about this is that instead of getting up a 6am and arriving home at 4pm and then spending two hours on homework....which is 12 hours...on school, they get two to four times as much learned, in more depth, better more accurate up to date info (current sources vs 10-20 or even older text books), in FOUR hours so they have an opportunity to actually interact with other kids and more time in the community volunteering.
The majority of my teacher/homeschool mom friends also say that their education degrees helped as much as a can of beans when homeschooling their own kids.
I'm a combination of IvoryT and your homeschooling mom friends: my education degree has helped me neither as a homeschooler nor as a teacher.
What has really helped?
1. My M.A. in English literature and subsequent graduate-level work in English. That's really paid off more times than I can even fathom. Thank you so much, Professor SA, Professor JH, Professor CC, Professor SS, and definitely Professor WV.
Why would stupid uncaring parents even care to have their kids around all day?
Silly Becky. Why, it's to do the housework and fetch beer cans, of course! (We must have forgotten to send yopu the memo.)
Seriously, it amazes me that this is even a real perception.
Homeschoolers are NOT as a category lazy/overinvolved/keeping the kids home to avoid showing signs of abuse/uneducated morons/social freaks/rabid religious fanatics/granola crunching hippie nonconformists.
Just like public school families aren't all unimaginative/sucking from the public teat/uncaring/lazy/violent/FCAT worshipping/ignorant heathen.
Just like private school families aren't all elitist/isolationist/fanatically religious/born with a silver spoon up their a**/nutjob swine.
Really, people. Get a grip. Life is not a series of stereotypes.
I'm a combination of IvoryT and your homeschooling mom friends: my education degree has helped me neither as a homeschooler nor as a teacher.
What has really helped?
1. My M.A. in English literature and subsequent graduate-level work in English. That's really paid off more times than I can even fathom. Thank you so much, Professor SA, Professor JH, Professor CC, Professor SS, and definitely Professor WV.
2. My own autodidactic tendencies.
Honestly, when I was doing adult ed the degree in theatre came in handier than anything else. Who knew?
How does a kid survive in the real world if mom and/or dad pulls them out of school because it might be too hard or it somebody yells at them fairly or unfairly?
I'm all for homeschooling if you think the kid is going to get a better education but not if the reason is school is too tough and you can make it easier for them. We have to work alongside these helmet wearing, knee pad wearers when they get to be adults.
How does a kid survive in the real world if mom and/or dad pulls them out of school because it might be too hard or it somebody yells at them fairly or unfairly?
I'm all for homeschooling if you think the kid is going to get a better education but not if the reason is school is too tough and you can make it easier for them. We have to work alongside these helmet wearing, knee pad wearers when they get to be adults.
Where did you get the idea that homeschoolers do so because someone treated them unfairly in school?
How does a kid survive in the real world if mom and/or dad pulls them out of school because it might be too hard or it somebody yells at them fairly or unfairly?
I'm all for homeschooling if you think the kid is going to get a better education but not if the reason is school is too tough and you can make it easier for them. We have to work alongside these helmet wearing, knee pad wearers when they get to be adults.
The truth is many of our kids are coddled these days. While I think homeschooling it the ultimate in catering to your child, WRT education, this is not limited to just homeschoolers. I see many kids who will not be prepared for the real world because of parental intervention in their schools. Many parents expect their child to be catered to. I had one mother, successfully, argue (administration did not support me) that her son should not have had to take a test in my class because he was absent the day before the test when I let kids ask questions. She insisted that he should get the same review everyone else got. Never mind that he had the same review sheet they did and had exactly the same amount of time to study.
I get emails all the time from parents wanting to know what can be done to improve their child's grade. Or objecting to my grading rubric. I have one arguing now that her daugher should get more credit for a lab that she barely did anything on because she was there the day the lab was done (apparently, you now get grades by just showing up). My rubric is right on my labs.
This is the most coddled generation in history. They've been taught they're special and expect to be treated special. They expect exceptions to be made for them. They expect to be given every opportunity to succeed. I had one girl come to me today because grades go out Friday and she's missing a lab. When I asked her why she didn't make it up, her reply was "I wasn't here that week". That was 5 weeks ago!!! Apparently, it's too much to ask that a student make up a lab within 5 weeks of an absence. These kids, and their parents, think they should just be excused from anything they missed.
On the bright side, kids like mine who take responsibility for themselves should be able to write their own ticket considering the competition.
The truth is many of our kids are coddled these days. While I think homeschooling it the ultimate in catering to your child, WRT education, this is not limited to just homeschoolers. I see many kids who will not be prepared for the real world because of parental intervention in their schools. Many parents expect their child to be catered to. I had one mother, successfully, argue (administration did not support me) that her son should not have had to take a test in my class because he was absent the day before the test when I let kids ask questions. She insisted that he should get the same review everyone else got. Never mind that he had the same review sheet they did and had exactly the same amount of time to study.
I get emails all the time from parents wanting to know what can be done to improve their child's grade. Or objecting to my grading rubric. I have one arguing now that her daugher should get more credit for a lab that she barely did anything on because she was there the day the lab was done (apparently, you now get grades by just showing up). My rubric is right on my labs.
This is the most coddled generation in history. They've been taught they're special and expect to be treated special. They expect exceptions to be made for them. They expect to be given every opportunity to succeed. I had one girl come to me today because grades go out Friday and she's missing a lab. When I asked her why she didn't make it up, her reply was "I wasn't here that week". That was 5 weeks ago!!! Apparently, it's too much to ask that a student make up a lab within 5 weeks of an absence. These kids, and their parents, think they should just be excused from anything they missed.
On the bright side, kids like mine who take responsibility for themselves should be able to write their own ticket considering the competition.
I doubt you'll even see my post but anyway...Did you ask her why she had not made it up? I guess I question how much time she might have had to do so. I mean, life goes on and does not revolve around your classroom. I remember when I was in school, my parents would not allow me to stay after school to complete work or use the library. They would not allow me to be at the city library either and would not bring me into town to use the resources there. They would not allow me to use the internet to do research or the computer to thye papers, it was their computer afterall. After school, my teachers were not often around so I did not have access to classrooms with the labs I might have needed. During classtime, there was no time to get caught up. I remember having to talk with teachers in other classes where I was ahead and having to convince them that I needed to spend that period to catch up in another class...which some took as me saying that some other class was more important than theirs and were nasty about it. Some were understanding and cool about it while others thought I had lied about it all...I mean, what type of parent would do that to their child. I had to give up my lunch period often to sit in the library...30 whole minutes...to try and get everything done I needed. I remeber fast scrolling and printing entire sites out so that I could take them home to use, not even knowing for sure if the information was really all that relavent and photocopying pages from books that were not allowed to be checked out of the library, frantically running to the computer to print something else.
What a cold hearted teacher to refuse to take personal tribulations into consideration. These are KIDS we are talking about. I recall my meanest, strictest teacher (the football coach) entire tough demeanor crumble when it came to helping kids face problems. He was tough on the kids that needed it, that did not want to change or rise above it, but if he saw a normally great kid fall apart, he was there to sit right in front of you, knee to knee and being supportive enough to make sure he gave you the time to get things down so you could rise about it.
I can also relate what you so in the adult world. We had a two girls whose friend had been killed in a freak accident. One girl came to work two days later and litterally stood and cried all day. They sent her home for a week. When the other girl stood and cried, the bosses gave her a "pep talk" to try and toughen her up and did not get it when she cried more. I finished my work quickly and took over her job, sent her home for the rest of the week and found other employees who were more than happy to take her shifts. He was furious and insisted that she come in, though I had already instructed her to not return the phone calls and if they harrassed her, to call the HR department about it.
Later, while sitting in a meeting with my boss and a dozen others, we listened as he went on about these weak girls who could not seperate life and work..."Come on," he points out, "How many of you actually knew my dog died a couple weeks ago, the day before coming back from vacation. Could any of you tell when I came to work?" That can compare????!!!
A guy I worked with had a son born still born and then just a couple months later had a little brother convicted of murder. Both of us had stood up against the bully while he rallied the other two women to help prove his point that it was about "maturity" rather than life tribulations taking their toll. It inferiated both of us. Imagine how things went when my aunt in law died a week later, then my mother in law two weeks after that, then my dog had to be put down, and then I find out that a had been stalked for 11 years by the same person days later...explaining the person following me home with their lights off at night after work was not a figment of my imagination. I got three shifts off of work. THREE SHIFTS! That is it! I had to be cool at work, help DH deal with his losses, help my children deal with their losses, AND hide the fact of the stalker from my family because I knew they needed to deal with their greif without the added stress of that added onto is. And I had to come to work and not only deal with it all in the back of my mind, but have to listen to what a burden I was on the company and catch up on all the work cause my boss refused to assign the work to others.
This is what SOMEONE here sounds like. This is classic bullying. Sadly, I am sure "someone" would say that kids need to learn how to deal with superior to inferior bulling because they will have to face it in the "real" world.
Quote:
On the bright side, kids like mine who take responsibility for themselves should be able to write their own ticket considering the competition.
Some children are not so lucky to have shiny lives as your children do. Why are you measuring children in your class against the ability of your children? Why can't kids be different from each other? Why is what you have to offer better than what anyone else has to offer? Why do you make 'some' people out to elitist who are clearly not? Why do feel such disdain toward other gifted kids? Why are you not supportive and understanding of the stuggles they deal with everyday?
You would have hated my French teacher. I walked in being able to read and understand French having never have taken it before. Pronuciation was the only thing I needed to learn. She NEVER had a problem with the fact that it was easy for me or that I had the natural ability to read what I saw simply because I had taken two years of Spanish. One day, a couple boys were talking in German in our French class and I was telling a friend what they had said. She heard it and went had to ask those boys had said. To her surprise I was write. She pulled me aside and asked me if I had ever taken German...our school did not have the option and she knew full well I hadn't. She thought it was hilarious.
She DID NOT go on and on about how I had to learn how to fail. She instead recommended some French movies to watch. She DID NOT grade me differently than my peers because I should be better than some other imaginary standard. She graded me against them, which she should have, an A of course. She never treated me like you treat your students. My teacher treated me like a human being and it felt great to be treated as so.
How does a kid survive in the real world if mom and/or dad pulls them out of school because it might be too hard or it somebody yells at them fairly or unfairly?
I'm all for homeschooling if you think the kid is going to get a better education but not if the reason is school is too tough and you can make it easier for them. We have to work alongside these helmet wearing, knee pad wearers when they get to be adults.
Define "too tough". Shoot, for that matter, define "helmet wearing knee-pad wearers".
I started homeschooling when a group of much older children (admittedly in the same grade) started sexually, physically and emotionally harassing my daughter to the point that she was suicidal, and the school did absolutely nothing (this was before Jeffrey's Law was passed; one hopes things have changed-- though that hope may simply be a reflection of a deep-seated Pollyanna streak).
It seemed like a good investment in her future to ensure that she...yanno...actually HAD one.
The fact that I have been able to teach her more in less time and in more detail than the local school had been able to do is purely serendipity.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
That can compare????!!!
