Does she think teachers teach kids in series and not in parallel?
She doesn’t know the difference
Well then she’s surely not going to be able to deal with the students’ resistance
It’s fine, because you do the math.
Does…does she think teachers can only teach one child at a time?
“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.
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.
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! :)
For me the most devastating part of homeschooling was the lack of opportunity to interact with peers and learn basic social skills/norms/etc.
I’ve been an adult over a decade now and to this day I haven’t made up for those formative years of cognitive/social development. I likely never can because the neuroplasticity of a 30+ y.o. is wayy different from that of a single-digit’s. But also because I was always “weird,” I never made friends, so I never got to practice the social skills that I missed, and was never able to catch up in any meaningful way, so the cycles of isolation compound on themselves.
I’m completely dysfunctional and maladapted as an adult, and since everyone blames me personally for my shortcomings, I’ve found it easiest to retreat even further into isolation. At this point I’m basically a shut-in. I used to try really hard “push through” and be a part of society, as if effort alone would ever be enough. I tried persevering in the face of ridicule, but ultimately my efforts only ever got me ridiculed and derided even harder.
At this point I’ve accepted my bitter fate, and strangely over the past year I’ve found a sense of peace like I’ve never known before. I’m still isolated, maladapted, and dysfunctional, but I’ve finally learned to be okay with that. Not that I would recommend this to anybody, but if there had been literally any other option available to me, I would have chosen that instead.
Literally nobody understands that they didn’t get their social intuition from birth, and that people don’t just magically come pre-packaged with that. So they think it’s absurd when I claim I don’t have that/don’t understand it. So they blame me when I don’t “just get it” when “it” seems so obvious to every “normal” person, apparently.
My twenties were a living hell. Even now I’m dead inside. The peace I feel now is the peace of the grave, and I resisted it every step of the way.
Folks, if you don’t hate your children, then say no to homeschooling.
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.
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…
Algebra is doing maths with unknown values. Things like 3 x A = 6 Where A is “something we dont know yet” - so “3 times something is 6”
In this case I think perhaps we can see that A should be 2, but we can steadily learn techniques to solve more and more complicated puzzles like this.
If you get really good at these sorts of puzzles, you can learn to turn a lot of real world problem into this sort of puzzle, and often you can learn things about the problem by looking at the maths.
We can use this to calculate all sorts of stuff, and its a base of a lot of maths that comes later which is used for basically all science, engineering, accounting, programming etc.
Simplest way you do algebra - item costs $5, you give the cashier $10, how much do you get back?
I’m sorry to hear about your upbringing. It must have been tough to adjust to adulthood.
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I’m a college professor and I’m not going to go around pretending to teach anything that isn’t related to my actual field.
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I went to a concert with 80k people. It was terrible, the band only played music for me for 90 milliseconds.
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.
and I knew people that were unschooled that knew three second languages from exposure and got a 4 on the ap calculus test. not all people should be homeschooled and not all parents should homeschool, but some will do it well.
4 kids, 1 overworked and unqualified-to-teach stay at home mom, 3 hours.
I 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.
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.
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.
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
Ok I was going to comment on the post but this completely captures everything I was going to say.
The professionals are professionals for a reason. I can work on my own car. Sometimes it even runs afterward.
I know homeschool families, and none of their kids went to college. They work at PetCo, construction, and seek drugs
Good old mythical man-hour
Its like saying, if we put 9 women together we can make a baby in a month
A good tutor could probably manage to teach what a kid learns in 7 hours of public school in 3 hours to a single student to be fair. But 3 tutors couldn’t teach a single student in 1 hour
I am a homeroom teacher in a primary school (private school, not in the US). Homeroom teachers at my school have 4 hours a day with our students. In the lower grades, we teach “core subjects” (math, reading, writing, science and social studies) in three of those four hours, and the other hour is social-emotional team building and language activities (speaking/listening and some phonics). In the upper grades each teacher is in charge of teaching one subject for the whole grade level, so I teach math for three hours and then I have the social-emotional/language hour with my homeroom class.
The other hours of the day are what some schools call “related arts” or “special area” classes – music, art, PE, etc. Our students also have a 30-minute lunch break and 70 minutes of recess time over the course of the day.
We follow US curriculum for the core academic subjects.
I absolutely believe that students can get through “what a kid learns in 7 hours of public school” in 3 hours of homeschool. School is designed to fill most of a work day so parents can work a full day, not because we have that much academic content to cover.
But I also know kids can miss out on some really important academic rigor (especially in math and science), socialization, and/or exposure to arts if their parents aren’t well-informed in their approach to homeschool.
Why 3 hours?
30 kids is more than I’d want, but I get it.
Yeah all the home school kids in my neighborhood are done by like 10:00AM 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.
The reality is 9 times out of ten not only is there no actual teacher. But the kid is actively being misinformed…
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…
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think having no classmates and a teacher without an education in pedagogy accelerates your learning speed by a factor of 2.333
