Home School Discussion and Poll

[Toto]

Any idiot with two brain cells that can be rubbed together knows Common Core education is the key because 4 out of 3 are confused about math and 50% of the population is below average intelligence.

Duh!

[Yahtzee]

These links were posted on a local Facebook homeschool group recently and I've been making plans to adapt them with my kids. We have our own list of "life skills" our kids need, but I especially liked the mission prep aspect of one. Feel free to use and adapt as needed.

http://myficklefarmhouse.blogspot.com/2 ... e.html?m=1

http://mormonmissionprep.com/preparing- ... for-youth/

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/or ... 135815678e

[Silver]

Any idiot with two brain cells that can be rubbed together knows Common Core education is the key because 4 out of 3 are confused about math and 50% of the population is below average intelligence.

Duh!

Hey, I resemble that remark.

[JohnnyL]

Common Core in early grades messes the children up pretty good, especially math. Been there, doing that. Chinese teachers come here and are amazed at how slow and ... stupid American children are. I know second graders who have to use their fingers to do <10 addition, and very few can do <20 addition without help of some kind. "Too much homework!!" Yeah, because three hours a day of video games isn't enough. ;(

[harakim]

...
Her two home schooled kids are societal derelics. With hardly any social skills or coping mechanisms. One is so angry at his parents, that he ran away from home and hasn't spoken to his mom or dad in 25 years. The other has been working at the local pizza parlor for the last 15 years after getting out of jail (several times), and divorced from a brief marriage at age 19.

So to me, Home Schooling is a farce, and Public Schools only two notches better. Weigh in the social aspects and getting along with various other types of people, and public schools waay out perform home schooling...
...

I know two different homeschool families where the kids are very sociable and very comfortable to talk with, more so than most children. I know public school families where the kids are very uncomfortable to talk with. I don't believe it's the schooling that makes the difference but the parents. If the parents are sociable then the kids tend to be too, however they are schooled.

I couldn't agree more.

You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. If the parents aren't instilling a desire in their children to learn, the kids are going to be mediocre. If the parents do instill a desire to learn in their children, they will grow up to be smart and happy. No teacher, public or private, has the time to teach your kid and all the other kids to love to learn. The best they can do is struggle to get them across the finish line. Then the next year, the next teacher will have to struggle. Eventually, the child will see a lifetime of struggling and 4-hour homework sessions as the only way to learn and they will reject it. Then you end up with pizza parlor princess or a runaway - regardless of schooling environment. Do you really think that the pizza parlor was staffed entirely by 30+ homeschoolers?

Show me the parents and I can tell you how the kid is going to do regardless of whether they are in home school, going to South Los Angeles High or Harvard Preparatory school. At some point, there are impediments due to bad environment or benefits that come from throwing tons of money at your student, but they are usually a negligible role. If your kid can't read when they enter kindergarden, they're probably going to struggle at life and it's your fault.

There was a kid in my area who had holes in his obvious hand-me-down clothes. He went to the second most crowded elementary school in the US and he prided himself on a rule: if he couldn't finish an assignment in class, he wouldn't do it. You know what? He drove all the preppy kids crazy. You could probably count on your fingers the number of test grades he got in his academic career that were not 90%+. The preppies would spend all night studying and, inevitably, he would get the high score. He just loved learning and read a lot. If the teacher was talking about something, he probably had read more comprehensively on the subject than the teacher. If all parents instilled in their kids what his parents did in him, America would be unfathomably great.

I know of a child who is barely 2 years old who I will call Riley. Riley is capable of: counting to 5, recognizing and naming all rainbow colors, recognizing at least half of the alphabet, finding a way to climb onto or get into anything, name almost all 50 states, run on a curb without falling off and making up jokes. Riley also has some strange super-power like abilities like identifying a map in any form or recognizing a playground from literally a mile away. Those particular skills may not come in very usefully, but Riley does it because they like to show off how smart they are. It will be tough to compete with the parenting of my hand-me-down-friend, but the parents are at least making an effort.

I have a few guidelines I use when determining what type of schooling to put my children into:
1) Public school has a negative effect on learning because you waste all your time doing menial work
2) Public school teaches kids to respect humans who claim authority
3) Public school teaches kids that they are not valuable - Teachers can and often do go so far as to deny small children the privilege of going to the bathroom
4) Kids don't all want to do school subjects at the time schools want them to - if you can take advantage of the ups and downs in interest and play to their unique skills, you can get a lot more mileage
5) If you teach your kid learning is fun, you will only have to provide opportunities rather than constantly ride them. See Proverbs 22:6
6) Reading and math are crucial, and at an early age
7) Kids need friends