I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.
I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.
"I am 20 minutes into the presentation when a woman interrupts me. 'When are you going to talk about God in all of this?' she asks."
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We had to pull my daughter out of her middle school and put her in an online school for reasons I don't wish to go into, but thankfully the online school is run by the county school corporation and she has a curriculum built by accredited teachers who are also there to talk to the kids by phone, videoconference or in person during school hours. And they are so receptive too. Suddenly I feel like educators care about my child.
But homeschooling? I would never even think of it. I don't know the first thing about pedagogy and neither does my wife. We did a less formal version of online schooling that was hastily put together during COVID while she was still in elementary school and it relied on me doing a lot of the teaching and I sucked at it. There's a big difference between being able to do fourth grade math and being able to teach a fourth grader how to do fourth grade math. A lot of those kids are getting so underserved by having parents, even well-meaning parents, who are not educators try to give their education.
And that doesn't even go into the "my son is learning to be a Christian as a homeschooler" bullshit.
There are definitely kids who would be better served by an alternative to regular public or private school, even school they can do from home. But educators need to be behind it, not parents. Not unless those parents have degrees in education.
exactly, parents trying to homeschool a dozen different subjects is always the worst option
That's what co-ops are for. We had one day a week where various parents would teach on their specialty, like theatre, biology, writing, music, etc.
I was homeschooled (and very grateful for it), and mom was NOT my teacher. She would organize a lot of things like extracurriculars (mostly for socialization), but the studying I did by myself. She'd tell me where to read and do exercises in the books, and that's it. And the testing in the end of the quarter would be done by a teacher in the school I was assigned to.