- pachrist@lemmy.worldEnglish2 hours
Both of my parents are teachers. There were several years in the late 90s and early 2000s where I was home schooled and I did fine because they were teachers.
But I knew so many other kids who did what my parents called “unschooling” where they just did nothing. Their parents were not homeschooling because they were passionate about personally giving their kids a good education, they just didn’t like public school, usually for racist or religious reasons, and couldn’t afford private school.
So they ended up being essentially latchkey kids who didn’t leave the house, and education was a choose your own adventure. Lots of the homeschool kids I knew had no social skills and struggled to read, write, and they couldn’t do math.
All that to say, that 1:1 attention isn’t worth much usually.
- 51 minutes
Public School: A qualified teacher with proven subject matter knowledge who is accountable, a curated curriculum designed by teaching and subject matter experts, as well as a meaningful diploma which actually lets colleges/employers understand roughly what you were taught and how you performed
Homeschooling: some random mom, with some random level, including potentially none at all, of qualifications and subject matter knowledge, and little to no curriculum supervision, and resulting in zero credible or meaningful certification
You do the math
3 hoursI wonder if the people that want to home school their kids are actually taking into account the fact that for younger children, education requires the weight of social conformity in order to take.
Seven-year-olds don’t want to learn their times tables. They want to play. They want to do the fun, easy shit.
But education is weightlifting for your mind. It’s hard, it’s difficult, it’s painful, and it requires that the person being educated put the effort in.
If there’s nobody there to make them put the effort in when they don’t know how to put the effort in, then they’re never going to learn how to put the effort in.
- 2 hours
My buddy home schools their 3 kids. Him and his wife are both solo practice consultants/contractors so they’ll sign on for a project and work 80 hour weeks for 2-3 months, then take a few months off. They alternate their work load and teaching their kids. They also love to travel, so it works for them.
They’re very mindful of the social interactions tho. They do all the “core” learning in 2 days a week. And spend 3 doing social/extra curricular things. Cooking classes, gymnastics, soccer, gardening, art, music, what ever.
They’re very much not a sterotypical “home school” family. My kids play with their kids about once a week and (i know im biased) but youd never guess his kids were home schooled if you just interacted with them.
Ages 8, 6, and 5
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am all for non-traditional education, but I also know that each person learns different things at a different rate, and there’s also a social component to attending school with people and seeing them on a regular basis that is incredibly difficult to recreate with homeschooling.
Like if I have my druthers, I will probably at the very least put my kids into a Montessori should I get to have any.
But it depends on their temperament.
I was a very motivated self learner. I read multiple encyclopedias, I would read our schoolbooks before the school year even started. So I never really had to put any effort in because I already knew all of the information and classes simply served as a refresher to help the information set in.
If my theoretical future child is similar, then a Montessori would be great for them because it would create an environment that would help them learn the information they are interested in learning while they’re interested in learning it instead of forcing them to go at the pace of a public school.
But the only way I would homeschool would be if I, I don’t know, won the lottery or something and had the time and inclination to ensure that my child had every single advantage affordable to them, afforded to them.
- 47 minutes
They acknowledge that. All their extra curricular activities are at the same place (a facility dedicated to non traditional schooling) so they see the same people and have those social interactions.
As for your “win the lottery comment,” theyve both established themselves as reputable in their fields and have basically given people the “fuck you i dont want to do this” rate for their projects. And they get fucking paid. Each of them makes more in 3 months than most make in a year doing a project theyre not passionate about, hence the down time right after. They have also strategically included “% of sales” in their contracts, so they continue to get paid after their done working.
- skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish3 hours
Many years ago I encountered a 10yo who was homeschooled because he got into fights with other kids. Always struck me as a short-sighted solution in terms of his personal development.
Also his mother/teacher was grossly unqualified to teach, she was barely literate herself.
I think there areabsolutely situations where it works out better, but there are always going to also be ohio house of horrors types.
no one pattern fits all.
Good old mythical man-hour
Its like saying, if we put 9 women together we can make a baby in a month
- djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish5 hours
Homeschooling, at least in the U.S., is actually one of the cheapest ways to get your child a quality education. The majority of public schools are effectively worthless, and for the few private schools that actually produce results, you’re practically paying college tuition for your kid to go there. It is the most time intensive on yourself though, since you’re basically doing the work of 6-7 teachers when it comes to preparing all your lesson plans. However, when we’re seeing more and more states just completely give up on education, where evolution is presented as a competing theory to creationism, I can respect someone taking charge and taking their child’s education into their own hands to ensure they are receiving an education on par with their European peers.
Now, is christy_faith_homeschool going to be providing that kinda quality, fact-based education to her children? I’d highly doubt it, which goes into the really shitty part of homeschooling; there might as well be no oversight. If there is any, I’ve personally not seen it at the scholarship company I work at. I know there are boards, but when we see a kid come in with 36 faith-based courses and only 8 academic ones, with no foreign language included, I really struggle to imagine that an unbiased third party has verified that child’s education.
- 6 hours
The social skills we learn from interacting with peers is probably more important than any technical skills the school can teach.
Everyone seems to understand that’s it’s not what you know it’s who you know. Even without that, being skilled at dealing with people and appeasing egos will get you further in most careers than anything else. But hardcore Christians will say that “who you know” phrase with Straight face, then turn around and make sure their kids don’t know anyone. That’ll surely set them up for success…
- 8 hours
“Teacher” seems to be a flexible term here.
There’s a big difference between someone who’s studied and practiced teaching a given subject and explaining it in a way that kids will understand, and a parent who knows only what they have read in the textbook.
And in a school, it’s not “1 teacher” - a kid will have a team of teachers, each with their own speciality. I think my English teacher would have done a pretty dodgy job if she’d had to teach us chemistry or biology.
- 7 hours
My mother/teacher was a product of our public school system and I have no idea how good of a student she was, but it didn’t matter because she had this amazing Christ-inspired curriculum that did all the work for her.
I’m not sure how typical my experience was, but for my mom, she was more drawn to the philosophical idea of home schooling and controlling what your children learn than the actual learning work.
In my family, we had bible together in the morning, and then broke to our separate rooms to work on math, social studies, science, etc.
A few things to note:
- Nobody but my mom checked our work - there was no equivalence or state testing. I mean I’m sure there was in our state but we didn’t participate
- My mom isn’t very smart and really didn’t have the energy to hound us to do our work anyway. We would get yelled at for not doing our assignments but again, more for the fact of disobeying here - the education itself wasn’t really important
- Pretty much our entire curriculum was Abeka, which is a garbage curriculum designed to substitute Christianity for actual learning
It won’t surprise you to learn that neither me nor any of my siblings went to college.
When I got my first real job, I was very gently informed that the “diploma” I had presented, which my dad had printed out of an MS word template, was not a valid document. Subsequently I had to quickly get a GED - which was the first and only time I’ve ever had any kind of sense of my actual education level compared to any kind of standard.
I still don’t have a confident answer to what Algebra is. At one point not long ago, I was putting together a somewhat complex formula in Excel and I wondered to myself, is this algebra?
I still genuinely don’t know, in case anyone wants to elucidate.
Without getting into the abstract definition, algebra is basically just arithmetic (“regular math”) using variables (like “x”) to represent unknown values. Typically you’re trying to find a value (a regular number) or an expression (a relationship between values and variables) equal to your variable.
When you “solve for x”, you’re doing algebra. If your Excel formulas reference cells as variables (e.g. “=A1*3”) then yes that is algebra, since the cell can take different values.
- 2 hours
Okay yeah that’s what I was thinking - particularly the cell reference as variable. Thank you for a great explanation.
I literally worked in finance for a major company for a period of time…
- 6 hours
Thanks for sharing! This was essentially my experience growing up, I am old now and never bounced back fully in math either.
I was the oldest of 8, so much of my time was helping my siblings with schoolwork on top of my own “self learning” Problem is most of our family is nerodivergent, undiagnosed until adulthood… So you know none of us got the help we needed either. Another flaw in homeschooling as you dont have people trained to pick up dyslexia early, so kids struggle too much.
Your comment helped me feel that someone out there understands, thanks! :)
- 7 hours
Depends on what point of their life, until middleschool it was 1 teacher for my elementary school, middleschool-highschool I think it was 6.
- 4 hours
Well then she’s surely not going to be able to deal with the students’ resistance
- Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.caEnglish6 hours
I was home schooled in addition to attending normal school. I think my old man was qualified though to teach math and science though. He was a nuclear physicist.
- scops@reddthat.comEnglish4 hours
I’ve met plenty of incredibly smart people who aren’t effective at relaying their knowledge to less educated audiences. Hopefully your old man was a good teacher in addition to being a nuclear physicist.
- Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.caEnglish2 hours
He was. Kept me well ahead of the class in terms of reading, writing, mathematics and science. I think he understood one of the fundamental requirements of being in academia.
One might be the smartest person in the room, but if they cannot convey that intelligence and knowledge to other people, you are essentially a chimpanzee with tenure.
Yeah all the home school kids in my neighborhood are done by like 10v00AM and are outside playing. I asked one of the parents about it once and she said that she gives them a worksheet to read while they eat breakfast, then reads something to them, then has them fill out a worksheet. Takes 3 hours or less, then the kids are bored and wander the neighborhood until their friends get home from the schoolbus.
I can’t imagine there’s a whole lot of learning going on in that little amount of time.
- endlessvoid@lemmy.todayEnglish6 hours
The number of comments here taking the joke seriously makes me feel like someone needs to chime in with a counter example. Myself and all my siblings were homeschooled by my very religious mother who had no professional qualifications. I ended up getting my GED and went to college for Electrical Engineering. My sister is currently in Med school (Only one of my siblings is still religious, so that part didn’t take root). Most of the religious homeschoolers that I knew growing up went on to have successful professional careers as well.
While I’m sure that some homeschoolers end up failing to launch, most learn at their own pace with personalized attention and learn valuable life skills on how to manage their own time in an unstructured environment.
- 6 hours
Wdym 7 hours? It was always 8 for us, and even 8 and 3/4 in the final year
