Public school teacher here...

Discussion in 'Home Schooling' started by malakala, Sep 28, 2008.

  1. malakala

    malakala Member

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    ...My recommendation to all of you (those interested in home schooling) is to use your home schooling energy to augment your kids' education, rather than to outright replace their public school exposure. My observation(s) is that there is no way a public school teacher in the system-as-it-is-now can provide the level of individualized instruction that is necessary for a kid to actually thrive. My most successful students are those who have parents/guardians actively working through the curriculum with them, acting as tutors or guides. At least where I am, there is no inherent shortcoming in the the curriculum itself. It's actually pretty comprehensive and culturally diverse. No need to prevent kids from the lessons they'll receive by being exposed to the student populace at large. Peer exposure is a key component to overall education in my humble opinion!
     
  2. woodsman

    woodsman Senior Member

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    But there is quite a bit of need to not expose them to the social anxieties and and truamas which only a public school can provide. Not to mention the diseases that can be picked up in an environment of a very large number of people confined in a very small space. If you're going to home school go all the way with it.
     
  3. malakala

    malakala Member

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    Woodsman, no disrespect intended, but that sounds like the "ostrich" approach if you know what I mean...just sayin'. The effects of social anxiety will actually be worse if your child has no foundation on which to build, once they eventually have to become socially acclimated. Such acclimation is inevitable unless your child is going to be a hermit/ascetic. Not to mention the fact that the body's immune system is actually strengthened by exposure to common ailments.
     
  4. Kinky Ramona

    Kinky Ramona Back by popular demand!

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    With the horrible education my boyfriend and I both received in public schools, we're unschooling our kids when we have them. Of course, it's important for a child to be a good student that their parents are active in the education process, but it's equally important that they have competent teachers and a good useful cirriculum. I don't know what kind of a teacher you are, malakala, I'm sure I've never been in a class of yours, but good teachers are rare gems. Most homeschooling parents homeschool because of the horrid turn the educational system has taken for the worse. I missed out on a lot of chances because of teacher and faculty incompetence, and I refuse to let my kids be failed by the same system that failed me.
     
  5. malakala

    malakala Member

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    Hmmm...I'd love to think that I'm one of those "rare gems!" I teach English at the high school level. What I witnessed in my own public school education, and what I'm witnessing now that I'm a teacher in "the system", is that the student(s) MUST have the drive to succeed. At least in the area I'm in, if you show motive & drive, you'll be placed in courses where you can reap the most benefits. If you try to get by with doing as little as you can, you get placed in classes where you're just passing time. I'm in NO WAY passing judgement on you, and I'm not familiar with your district obviously, but can you tell me 100% sincerely that you, as a student, did EVERYTHING you could to get the most from your public education? True, there are some teachers in the system who are just waiting to cash in their pensions. For every one of them however,I know at least a half-dozen teachers who'd bend over backward for their pupils. My problem with our culture-at-large is the persistent pursuit of doing as little as possible to get by, never going "above and beyond." I've seen it in the workforce (before career transitioning to teaching) and I'm seeing it in a large number of my students. That is why you're seeing other countries starting to surpass the U.S. in productivity rates (in education, industry, technology, etc.) at an alarming rate. The problem is much more deeply rooted and ecumenical than just having some poorly skilled public school teachers in the system. We need to tackle the problems from every societal angle, starting with family/home life. That is where true education begins.

    Finally, when you get right down to the facts,home schooling addendums to your child's education are CRUCIAL, because we teachers only have a limited amount of time with our pupils. The overall lack of time and aforementioned overcrowding of classes makes us even more dependent on family members and/or other outside tutelage assisting with the process of pedagogy.
     
  6. Kinky Ramona

    Kinky Ramona Back by popular demand!

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    I graduated 6th in my class, 3.85 GPA. The drive was there. I taught myself MOST of the stuff I learned in high school. But I'm not in college and missed out on a ton of scholarships and grants to take concurrent classes (college classes for both college and high school credit) in school because we had a pathetic counselor. I spent so much time digging for scholarships, filling out paperwork, applying for loans, and all I got was $1000 because our counselor refused to help us. The year before I graduated, the VALEDICTORIAN almost didn't graduate because the counselor "misplaced" some of her credits. I was screwed out of NHS for 2 and a half years that I was eligible because she calculated everyone's GPA incorrectly until I went in there my senior year and demanded she figure out why my straight A's that year STILL were not enough to qualify me. I got in two weeks before graduation because I made her find and correct her error. I had some good teachers, but the entire time I was in school, I had ONE math teacher (out of 7 total) that knew how to teach math. I SUCK at math and scraped by with a B, but the year I had the good teacher, I had a 4.0 GPA. Some school systems are just crap, I know that, and I know that both Dan and I were unfortunate enough to graduate from the same terrible system.

    At the school we graduated from, teachers get bounced from subject to subject, so often times they end up teaching a subject they know zero about. My algebra teacher my freshman year ended up failing his exam to teach the class that same year, so he got switched to history. My US history teacher my junior year gave TWO lectures the entire two semesters, on the days he was getting evaluated, and I guarantee that the rest of the classes didn't get lectures at all. "Read the chapter, answer the questions at the end"- THAT is what our public school systems have become. I have learned SO MUCH more from Daniel in the past 3 and a half years than I ever did in school and that's sad.

    Maybe if by the time I have children, we've relocated to a different place, I'll consider homeschooling, but if I have kids while we're still living in this town with such a bad educational system, they'll be much better off learning from their daddy.
     
  7. Argiope aurantia

    Argiope aurantia Member

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    Hmm. With the possible exception of Woodsman, I seem to be the only actual product/participant of homeschooling on this thread. So, as a student since 1st grade, and a future homeschooling parent, I have to add my two cents.

    I'm a university student right now: a French major. As stated, my family homeschooled me from first grade through my entry into college at age sixteen. I currently hold a 3.59 GPA: it's dropped a bit since I started working full-time, but my husband and I are starting our own household now and part-time just will not pay the bills. Socially, which seems to be everyone's first complaint, I never had a problem. But then, I'm not a very social person. I've always been a loner. Homeschooling gave me educational opportunities that I would never have had in a classroom. My most valued lesson was how to study without a teacher. I have studied independently everything from arachnology to literature to fiber arts since my graduation. Granted, there were some disadvantages: my mother is very religious, and belief in the Christian Bible was required to graduate. . . or at least the ability to feign it. All of my science and history was taught with Genesis as the main textbook. She was also a terrible math teacher. I made it out, learning from her mistakes, and bought my own math textbooks to study from last year. I pulled straight A's in my college mathematics courses, after a high school career of C's. Any of my professors will tell you that homeschooling has worked wonders for me, even considering the drawbacks.

    My husband's family swore by the public school system. He got terrible marks in school because he was too busy educating himself in the library to do his homework. He entered college as a D student with a better education than some of his professors. He even beats me. He should have been homeschooled, and we never even had to discuss whether our spawn will be homeschooled. They will, as long as they need it.

    My younger sister is another matter entirely. She should never have been homeschooled. She can't learn alone, and needed a teacher over her shoulder when Mom had to return to work. She was twenty years old, a sophomore in college, and three weeks from her wedding when we realized that she still didn't know where babies came from. We knew she was bad at science, but this floored my father. She is much more social than I, and was starved for company throughout her adolescence. She wound up a housewife for a perpetually unemployed husband, but all she needed to know about him was that he was Christian. . . She never developed independent logic, and believes anything that the preacher says as fact.

    Homeschooling, unschooling, and classrooming all have their merits. Children are different, and each one will need different educations. Some parents have no business homeschooling their kids. We knew families that taught their daughters from first grade ONLY home economics and the state requirements (from a religious viewpoint, of course). These girls couldn't become anything other than housewives now even if they could build up enough willpower to want it. That, I think, is a horrible injustice to the children. Some families are more liberal: not right wing-motivated. Will Smith's son is homeschooled, because the family has to move around so much and they want to be able to stick together.
    Emilie Autumn, my favorite musician, was unschooled after her violin habits got her bullied mercilessly in grade school. All teachers will have weaknesses, but with the correct usage those weaknesses can teach the child more than any of the strengths can. If you really listen to your children, you can hear what they need.
     
  8. malakala

    malakala Member

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    Fantastic input sister...Let me clarify my stance in the discussion. I'm in no way advocating exclusion of a home schooling regimen in favor of public education, nor am I going to extoll the virtues that homeschooling has over public education. I'm simply of the mindset that a holistic approach makes the most sense. Why not give your children the most well-rounded education that you can? Tutor, augment and even debate what they're learning in school during the 180 days in public school, then shift gears to a homeschool/parent designed curriculum the rest of the year. That'll be my approach with my own children. Just caring about the subject enough to have commented on an online forum shows me that y'all will be the type of parents whose children will find success regardless of which path you choose. I'm just offering humble advice.

    ps-do you really think Will & Jada do the teaching themselves? I'm sure they have VERY high paid tutors/teachers who make a lot more than any public school teacher.
     
  9. Argiope aurantia

    Argiope aurantia Member

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    I'm not certain, but they were in an article on the growing prevalence of homeschooling in an educator's journal I picked up at random in a bookstore. It's not the best source, I know.

    I will say this: that if you have to send your brood off to a classroom then you definitely should take part in the education: particulary sex ed. I've seen the results of these "abstinence only" programs, and I pray to several gods that they become obsolete fast, but nothing beats "THE TALK." Will you trust your baby's sexual health to a government-designed course? I wouldn't.
     
  10. Valdis

    Valdis Member

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    When my kids were in school I spent a lot of time there helping out. When they begged to be homeschooled and told me that they learned MORE from me than in their very good schools I brought them home.

    As a result they've gotten a deeper education and more time for their passions than they would have otherwise had.

    My oldest starts college in the fall with a four year academic scholarship to the college of her choice.

    My youngest hopes to do the same in two years only on an athletic scholarship.

    I told them when they were old enough to understand all about sex. I think abstinence is a very damaging thing for both sexes in our society. I sure don't endorse or teach that.
     
  11. MunaJadida

    MunaJadida Member

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    A lot of people seem to think that all homeschoolers are keeping their kids locked in the house away from society and then kicking them into college dorms when they're 18. Yeah right. Why is it that public school is the one and only possible way to get socialized or be able to interact with people? My son is only 4 and he's entirely aware of how to behave around people.

    The greatest thing about homeschooling is that he can socialize with people of all ages, all backgrounds. He's not spending 8 hours a day 5 days a week sitting on his butt in a classroom with 20 other kids his exact age with similar backgrounds to him. He can get out in the real world from the start. He's not being hidden from the real world, he's actually a part of it.

    I spent 13 years in public schools - 12 of them, to be exact, in five different states. I certainly understand what the public school system is like. I graduated with honors. I remember very little of what I learned in school. You want to know why? Because I didn't care. I got A's and B's without trying. I learned just as much as I had to, then did a brain dump the second I didn't need it anymore. With things I've chosen to learn, however, I remember even unimportant things years later. Because they interest me, because they're relevant, because they matter to me. I plan on mixing homeschooling and unschooling with my kids. Whenever we want to learn about something, we head out and learn about it. We don't have to wait because "We have to learn about THIS now, we don't have time to learn about THAT right now." DS can learn about what he wants when he's ready, not at some arbitrary age some random person decided was the age this particular skill or topic must be learned. So he'll remember it and be able to use it because he wanted to learn it and he was ready to learn it.
     
  12. malakala

    malakala Member

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    MunaJadida, your "qualifications" are??? Does tinkering under the hood of a car make one a mechanic? Does cooking boxed mac 'n cheese make one a gourmet chef? To the craftsman his craft, dig? ...Just playing devil's advocate here.
    You seem bitter and jaded regarding public schools, as do other posters herein...My initial post was meant to convey the idea that a WELL ROUNDED education best benefits a child, including a public/private school curriculum AUGMENTED by that which a family/parent chooses to focus on. Not all school teachers are robots programmed to further the agenda of "the man"....I'm a free thinker who chooses much of my own curriculum (within state frameworks guidelines of course) and encourages free thinking amongst my students. Why take an adversarial stand? Finally, your stance about letting your child choose his/her own path educationally is, to me, like letting him/her choose his/her diet. What kid wouldn't choose P, B, & J sandwiches or oreo cookies or the aforementioned boxed mac 'n cheese over an organic sprout and hummus wrap? Do you see my point? Sometimes a relativistic, laissez-faire approach only is detrimental to well rounded development, development being the operative word in the sentence.
     
  13. Argiope aurantia

    Argiope aurantia Member

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    Play nice, you two. Don't make me give you a detention. ;P

    Unschooling would not be my first reccommendation. I would have only studied literature and art if my parents had done that. It works for some children, though. If it's working for yours, go for it.

    And MunaJadida, if a parent is keeping his children "locked up until age 18," then college may not even be in the question. My mother honestly expected me to go to college solely in search of a husband then never really use my degree. That's how she found hers, after all. I am a little bitter about my homeschooling, I'll admit, but only because of the conservativism. The homeschooling itself was the best thing I could have possibly gotten, and the conservativism would have been forced down my throat anyway. Unfortunately, these families are too often the public face of homeschooling. But what are you going to do? Take the children away because of the parents' religion? Require government monitoring of all homeschoolers? There's some nice, slippery slopes. Personally, I think that these groups will be gone in a few generations anyway.
     
  14. Kinky Ramona

    Kinky Ramona Back by popular demand!

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    But the thing is that it is so difficult to find a well-rounded education in a public school setting. If every teacher was like you, public school systems would be awesome, but the real fact of the matter is that there are bad teachers plaguing school districts everywhere. Not to mention, when you have teachers teaching fields they aren't even familiar with (which happened to me several times in fact), then it's like the blind leading the blind.

    You shouldn't be focusing your time here arguing with homeschooling parents, you should be focusing your time on helping to improve the overall quality of public schooling. Put your foot down to teachers being bounced from subject to subject, to teachers who let the book teach their students for them. Yes, most of the posters replying are jaded, and it's no wonder. So instead of preaching upon deaf ears, maybe you should preach to the school district. By opening this thread, you're conducting a study you can present to your higher ups as means of increasing attendance and improving educational quality. If you're so concerned about people homeschooling their kids, start fixing the problem. And I'm sorry, but if sitting idly in your classroom, teaching like a good teacher and letting everyone else suck was an improvement, things would have changed long ago.
     
  15. MunaJadida

    MunaJadida Member

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    Qualifications? I never claimed to be a qualified public schoolteacher. I am, however, qualified to teach my son. Certainly more qualified than policymakers and curriculum designers who have never met him and known nothing of his learning style or needs. I am more than qualified according to the state of Ohio, which only requires a high school diploma (I have two college degrees, so all set there).

    I'm not understanding what your problem with me is. I have no problem with you or what you do. I do disagree with the methods of learning that are usually used in public school programs and I have chosen to use a different method with my family. It's not an attack on you, your beliefs, or your profession. Just because I'm homeschooling doesn't mean I think public schools are evil or teachers don't care or whatever. It just means that I feel that my child will receive a better education through homeschooling. It works for us.
     
  16. Dakota's Mom

    Dakota's Mom Senior Member

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    I am a homeschooling parent. My son wouldn't make it in school at all. They would have him on meds for adhd in a second. But because we homeschool, he can take breaks when he needs them. He can work on things that he is most interested in. He can go to plays and cultural events whenever they are available to him. He is not being taught "to the test" as most public schools do now. He is being taught by someone who loves him and takes all of his needs into consideration all the time. My attention is not divided between 30 or 40 or even 50 other kids like the schools here are. I cant imagine a first grade teacher with 40 kids in her class being able to teach anything.

    We are involved with other homeschooled kids on a regular basis. Sometimes too regular. But he is not forced to spend 6 hours a day with a group of 6 year olds. He has friends who are 6 and friends who are 26 and friends who are 60. And he learns from all of them. We are on a first name basis with our local librarian. She will put aside new books for him when they come in because she knows what he likes. We go to the theater, plays, the Art Museum, play soccer. He is much more social than his mother.

    For my son, homeschooling is a perfect fit. He would not be at the level he is if he were in public school. He also does not have to deal with the attitudes and peer pressure of public school. FOr our family this is a good fit. For other families it may not be. I find it very interesting that in our local homeschool group several of the families have at least one parent who is a public school teacher. Yet they find that it is better for their child to homeschool.

    Oh and you want credentials. I have a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Masters in Guidance and Counseling.

    Kathi
     
  17. bluesafire

    bluesafire Senior Member

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    I don't think there's a one-fits-all system. For my child and family homeschooling works best and we're happy with it. My daughter is about 2 grades ahead than the kids her age who go to public school, and we have pretty light work loads during the day, except we do it year-round.
     
  18. mamaKCita

    mamaKCita fucking stupid.

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    i'd have been a homeschooling parent had i not known from experience that i'm totally shitty at it. i'm good at helping with homework, a little.
     
  19. Argiope aurantia

    Argiope aurantia Member

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    Qualifications? Oh, merde.

    Aside from my own schooling, erm, I'm working towards my first Bachelor's now. French language, with the possibility of switching my minor from Religious Studies to World languages so I can graduate faster and LEARN MORE LANGUAGES.
     
  20. malakala

    malakala Member

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    That's cool...now what about teaching your kid(s) math & physics? No one can be an expert educator in all the various subject areas you'd like your children to be exposed to. Even if you're a brilliant language student, there's no guarantee that you'll be a great teacher of language arts.

    Story-I bought dozens of books about training GSD's before I got my dog. I studied them astutely and watched many training DVD's. 6 weeks into having my puppy I realized I needed hands-on help. I brought him to a professional trainer and he not only trained the dog, but me as well. I thought I could become an expert and do it on my own because I'm a pretty quick learner, but that didn't hold a candle to experience. Do you want to make your child's education a petrie dish of learning and teaching? A Ph.D. in Algebra does not necessarily make one a great algebra teacher...

    I've NOT been trying to be adversarial in my posts at all. I'm just making the point that homeschooling is an essential component of any well rounded education, but not the ONLY one. Ramona, you've been uppity with me throughout the post, and I'm not sure why. Your own experiences are not enough to base things on societally...did you ask for a transfer into another school if you thought yours lousy enough? Most systems will accommodate such requests if a reasonable case is presented...not to mention that many districts will provide vouchers in such cases to private schools.

    Also, don't forget that many types of schools fall under the umbrella of "public" schools... I myself teach at a vocational school where students get training in a trade of their choice by some of the best in their respective industries. Then there are charter schools, arts magnet schools, etc. from which you can choose to send your child. I never precluded private school from the conversation here either...My main point was that learning in a school setting, in addition to work done at home with family/parents, is the best formula for a holistic education, imho. Whether the work done at home is simply the parents assisting with school assigned work, or the implementation of a broader, home designed curriculum, a team effort all around is what helps a child most.

    Sorry if anything I've stated has offended anyone, it certainly hasn't been meant to. You and your children's best interests are mine as well, I assure you.
     

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