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[quote=Aconite;10423629]We use genealogy for a good bit of it, and biography for some. I've also related a fair amount of history to the age of our house, though I suppose in McMansionland that could be problematic. Still, as someone who grew up Pre-Channel One and who adores American History, I would suggest that intimate knowledge of the product line of the M&M-Mars Company is not necessary and not even particularly "fun". [quote]
I was able to use Hubba Bubba bubble gum history to discount history once. A man stated some history that included a piece of Hubba Bubba bubble gum. The first theory was that the year that the history was stated was incorrect...or the type of gum was. After looking at all the facts, we were able to determine, although Hubba Bubba had not yet been invented, another kind had been popular in miliary rationed meals with a simliar name. Can't blame the Old Fart for forgetting that it wasn't Hubba Bubba that was used to deal with the mess that those MRE's caused inside him.
On the other hand, home-schooled children almost always come from upper-middle class white families, in good neighborhoods, where dad earns enough money to allow mom to stay home and "educate" their kids 24-hours per day.
It simply is not a fair comparison, and everybody who looks honestly at it is forced to admit it.
Um, my mother homeschooled me in Harlem, in low-income housing.
Where there's a will there's a way...
I credit homeschooling with me eventually being accepted to four Ivy League schools. And at the time, everyone heckled my mother (who didn't have a college degree at the time) saying there's no way she could provide us with an adequate education.
Homeschooling typically is so much more rigorous and intense than public schooling, as I found out when I attempted to go to public high school. My mother was reading Homer and Socrates to me at 9, you just don't get that in public schools nowadays.
I remember in fifth grade my mother sending me to a local program in Harlem, and how 10 year old's around me could barely read, and my sister and I were the only kids who could read fluently.
I think you're probably ascribing far more power to M&Ms than they actually have. Tooth decay and obesity, maybe (though since the Health Department comes in to teach them how to brush their teeth and weighs & measures them every year I'm guessing that could be a wash)...but confidence?
Kids who are healthier tend to have more confidence with themselves.
Ahhhh, that that is precisely the point! Public schools ARE required to "take responsibility" for those low-end students! That is precisely what is brought up every time there is a discussion about public schools.
On the other hand, home-schooled children almost always come from upper-middle class white families, in good neighborhoods, where dad earns enough money to allow mom to stay home and "educate" their kids 24-hours per day.
It simply is not a fair comparison, and everybody who looks honestly at it is forced to admit it.
Yet, anyone who is forced to look at it and all the demographics still cite the irrational fears of hidden child abuse.
Public Schools are required to accept every student in their district - even if that student is mentally handicapped. Many public school classrooms have several students who cannot speak English.
My daughter attends an upper-tier magnet high school that is in an economically-distressed area of the city. There is a vast divide between the top-achieving students and the bottom-enders. (In fact, there were 4 students who got perfect scores on their ACTs last year.) Still, the WHOLE SCHOOL AVERAGES may not look overly impressive, even though it's an extremely impressive school!
There are public schools that weed out the students who do least well on testing. There are arrangements in some states that students in state-wide programs will have their scores included in their local districts.
That there is a huge divide between the students who do the best and those who do the worst is not exactly shocking news.
But the notion that because the school magnetically attracts high end students and is impressive for them does not make it any less impressive if it fails to meet the needs of the students with fewer things going for them.
I have no idea which school you are talking about, but if we compare your school's averages, range, and SD with other magnet schools in other urban economically depressed areas, how does it do?
Is it still 'impressive' when comparing like to like?
On the other hand, home-schooled children almost always come from upper-middle class white families, in good neighborhoods, where dad earns enough money to allow mom to stay home and "educate" their kids 24-hours per day.
It simply is not a fair comparison, and everybody who looks honestly at it is forced to admit it.
You're mostly right, but miss on the "upper-middle class" side of the equation. Yo also missed the point made earlier than the gap between home school and public school performance exists across income levels - with homeschool at the lower end outperforming those in higher brackets.
I said this to Ivory and I will say it to you:
Take the equivalent demographic population in the public schools - the white families with single sources of income and married parents living together - and compare those to the homeschool families. Don't forget to match number of children, while you're at it, as homeschool families tend to have more children, on average.
Go ahead. I'll wait.
**********
All your complaints about the unfairness of it all go towards many school-to-school comparisons, as well. Look at the states at the top of the ACT scores list vs. those at the bottom, and you will see northern states with higher per capita incomes and higher white populations dominating.
Clearly, then, we should stop comparing states with each other unless they share demographics. Or towns vs. cities. </sarcasm>
It's ridiculous to say "history in elementary public schools is a joke." It may be in some schools, but not all. Curriculum is only one part of the story. As far as saying "my kids already studied that," well, I'm a historian, and guess what? I studied early American history in elementary school, junior high, high school, college, and graduate school. You don't study something once and move on. You come back to it over and over, adding new nuances each time. A 7-year-old's understanding is not going to be anything like what a 12-year-old gets out of it, regardless of quality of education.
You're also not giving kids much credit. Sure, some don't know much, but spend some time with kids who have gone to public schools and you may find yourself impressed with the amount of knowledge many DO have. Have you ever been to a History Day event? The projects done by some of these kids are wonderful examples of in-depth primary source research, and certainly worthy of praise.
As far as not knowing about wars in Africa or other such modern issues, you're forgetting that all of this really does depend on local circumstances. Believe me, the kids in Minneapolis are well aware of recent African history. That's a bit of an aside, but not only are school experiences very diverse, but so are the kids themselves. Not everyone's background traces back to Europe.
Maybe the schools in your area are bad, maybe you live in an area where people don't pay much attention to history, but your own individual experiences don't translate into "all schools are terrible." I had a great public school experience (at some classic "inner city" schools, no less) but I realize it doesn't translate into "all public schools are wonderful." It does, however, show that there's a wide variety of experiences out there.
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A 7-year-old's understanding is not going to be anything like what a 12-year-old gets out of it, regardless of quality of education.
This is where you are incorrect about my daughter at least. She is an exceptional child, half way through the sixth grade, and with the understand of an adult with some things.
But regardless of that, I believe that there is no reason to water it down for kids. They do and can understand if it they were given the credit to. An example...
I was putting together the beginnings of my 3 year olds portfolio and searching for fresh worksheets on shapes and grade expectations on them for geometry. He may only be three but he has learned the difference between a cube and cuboid and triangle vs square based pyramids. I wanted to lay it out as expectations for grade level so when that comes up when he is at that grade level, I don't automatically skip over it if there is more to it.
Anyway, for kindergarten, kids should be able to tell you what a square, circle, oval, diamond, rectrangle, and triangle are. By th third grade, they are then retaught what that a diamond is actually a rhombus and an oval is an ellipse. My kids would fail the first test and be considered behind because they would not be able to point to "diamond" or "oval" since I have always used the correct term in the first place.
The idea with shape learning in the first place starts with introducing new words. If you have to introduce a new word and the kid has the capability of learning that new word in relation to a shape on a piece of paper, why is it that they can not learn a different word for the same shape instead.
Spelling is another example. Quoted straight from AVKO Sequential Spelling 1.
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Regular spelling texts, as a general rule, pick grade level words according to when teh words first appear in the curriculum. This would seem to make sense, but does bring out some rather odd sequences. Since the word ice may not occur in teh curriculum until the fourth grade (when it appears in the science class), its introduction is delayed until that time when nice may occur in the first grade, twice in the second grade, price in the fifth, and rice in the sixth.
Like I have said before, our daughter learned the word beginning on day 5 of her curriculum and misunderstanding was the longest word she learned last year. They point out that the New Iowa Basics state that 8% of all public school 3rd grader can be expected to correctly spell beginning and only 60% of all 8th graders.
Day 1 they learn, in, pin, sin, spin
Day 2: I, pins, sins, spins, kin, skin, win, twin
Day 3: thin, pinned, sinned, I, shin, skins, wins, twins, be, begin, chin, she
Day 4: thins, pinning, sinning, spinning, shins, skinned, winning, inner, be beings, chins, we, wee, bee, see, tree
Dat 5: thinned, thinner, sinner, spinner, fins, Mr. Skinner, winner, be, inning, beginning, chinned, we, wee, bee, see, trees, free, agree, disagree, fees
Some words or homonyms are repeated to make sure that they are landed such as should and would.
Because they learn a pattern and are introduced to bigger words than usual, they have larger vocabularies and they use these words when they are writting. Not only that, they are learning in a progressive manner that allows them to have the ablility to spell words that they have never spelled before simply because they already have learned their phonic pattern.
Schools waste a lot of time jumping around and teaching fluff. Cut all that out, lay everything out in a better sequence, and more depth and then maybe public United States schools wouldn't have the negative rap they have in other countries. A German exchange student who spoke 7 languages once told me, as we prepared to graduate, that she would have to take summer school back home to get caught up with her peers and would have another year of school there before graduating with her peers. In this thread, there has been a lot of emphasis put on socialization and emtional and social development. It was then that I learned she was a full two years younger although she was about 4 years more socially and emotionally mature that her US peers. While she loved her US friends, she was longing for home and the challenge that her lifestyle there provided.
Saying that a 7 year old and a 12 year old are different doesn't mean that the younger child isn't doing advanced work; it just means that kids have different developmental milestones. A 12 year old has more years of life experience and has more years of education (both formal and informal), and therefor experiences the world differently. Give it a few more years and the 16 year old is going to have a different outlook than the 12 year old. It has nothing to do with quality of education, level of intelligence, or anything else. A seven-year-old, however smart, is not an adult. She is also not a preteen or a teenager. It has nothing to do with watering down the information.
To take it into adulthood, I have a different appreciation for the experiences of women and mothers now than I did before I had a kid. I think one can be a top scholar on women's history without having had children, but I can attest that my personal experience with pregnancy and birth has given me a deeper understanding of some of the implications it would have had on the lives of women in previous centuries. You don't need personal experience to understand or appreciate or study these things, but it does change one's perspective. I've never been in a war zone, and I'm sure that anyone who has been involved in a war or who has visited such an area has a different reaction to reading about wartime experiences, for that matter. A seven year old has limited life experience, so it's only logical that his or her understanding of various things is going to evolve with time.
In response to the Hubba Bubba post, you also don't "state" history. You interpret it. You teach kids the difference between firm facts and believed facts, and you teach them to be skeptical and to verify everything they can. You teach them not to trust that the written word -- whether the writings of a modern scholar or the publication of a source from the time -- is the "truth." Learning how to think is part of a solid historical education, too. It's great that you had an opportunity to fact check an erroneous Hubba Bubba story, but that's exactly the sort of thing that should be expected in any good historical learning experience. No one should EVER blindly believe what's in a textbook, and anyone who does so -- teacher or student -- is failing as a teacher or a student.
And as far as "fluff," you missed my earlier point that what seems like fluff on the surface can actually be used as an entry point into decidedly non-fluffy material.
How do you know that this German student was "four years more socially and emotionally mature" than her US peers? What does that mean? How do you quantify that? How would you possibly casually evaluate that in someone?
It's ridiculous to say "history in elementary public schools is a joke." It may be in some schools, but not all. Curriculum is only one part of the story. As far as saying "my kids already studied that," well, I'm a historian, and guess what? I studied early American history in elementary school, junior high, high school, college, and graduate school. You don't study something once and move on. You come back to it over and over, adding new nuances each time. A 7-year-old's understanding is not going to be anything like what a 12-year-old gets out of it, regardless of quality of education.
You're also not giving kids much credit. Sure, some don't know much, but spend some time with kids who have gone to public schools and you may find yourself impressed with the amount of knowledge many DO have. Have you ever been to a History Day event? The projects done by some of these kids are wonderful examples of in-depth primary source research, and certainly worthy of praise.
As far as not knowing about wars in Africa or other such modern issues, you're forgetting that all of this really does depend on local circumstances. Believe me, the kids in Minneapolis are well aware of recent African history. That's a bit of an aside, but not only are school experiences very diverse, but so are the kids themselves. Not everyone's background traces back to Europe.
Maybe the schools in your area are bad, maybe you live in an area where people don't pay much attention to history, but your own individual experiences don't translate into "all schools are terrible." I had a great public school experience (at some classic "inner city" schools, no less) but I realize it doesn't translate into "all public schools are wonderful." It does, however, show that there's a wide variety of experiences out there.
But we never claimed there were NO wonderful things going on or that NO school does a good job or any of the things that you are countering here.
I, at least, was objecting to your initial claim that "Details vary by state, but a strong foundation of history is built up year after year..."
You responded to my post, granting that ""Strong foundation" is probably not the norm, but they've at least been exposed consistently to history over the years, with the quality of history education depending on the classroom."
It's not just that "strong foundation" is not the norm.
"Weak foundation" coming into high school is the norm. "Weak foundation" coming out of high school is the norm.
It's good that in a survey of 17 year olds, 97% knew that MLK, Jr. gave the "I have a dream" speech.
But only 74% of them knew that Columbus sailed before 1750.
73% knew that Japanese-Americans were forced into internment camps.
60% knew that WWI was sometime between 1900 and 1950.
43% knew that the Civil War was between 1850 and 1900.
51% knew that the controversy surrounding Joseph McCarthy was about communism.
But we never claimed there were NO wonderful things going on or that NO school does a good job or any of the things that you are countering here.
.
You might not be claiming that, but some people are indeed making that argument.
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