I fear the same will happen to the notion of home schooling.
(Other than extreme edge cases).
I see no issue with home schooling receiving a negative rep.
Unless you're a trained educator, I see no benefit to home schooling children and depriving them of standard curriculums and socializing.
(I'm biased having only experienced positive public school environments in Russia and Canada. Perhaps there is some dystopia with the American Public School system, but the root problem is America, not public schools)
There are so many things that happen when you are sitting in a class of 32 students that could be far better. Delays simply due to lagging students, teachers not having time to properly explain things, or get to understand and correct holes in their students' knowledge, tailor subjects to their tastes and interests, etc. Some random acquaintance who home schooled her children pointed out to us that their biggest problem - after finishing the government mandated curriculum for the day in 2 hours - was finding things to actually keep the kids busy for the rest of the day. It makes me wonder what an optimised education system could actually achieve.
There's also the issue that in a home schooling environment, the student is vastly freer to just ask questions. In a school, there's a curriculum and a lesson plan to follow, so the only questions that get answered are along the lines of "how do I do (this thing you just asked me to do)".
Another way to put that is that public schooling has the same problem, and institutionally at least the solution is to just discourage those questions.
A parent teaching their child for months and years gets a pretty good idea of how their child learns. They don't need to know how to accommodate every learning style, they just need to figure out one.
On the flipside, I have had several real teachers about whom I frequently wondered why they had chosen teaching as a profession. It was like they lacked both the aptitude for it, and had an intense dislike of students. To be fair, most were not like this, and there were a few truly excellent ones. But to make the argument that they are all highly trained, excellent professions is a bit of a stretch.
That being said, you don't need to know all the material on day one. My mother did not know algebra when she taught it to my older brother the first time. She simply worked through the book a few lessons ahead of us, and if we ran into a problem we really couldn't answer, she reached out to friends and/or family who might be able to help. And I'm sure that wasn't the first or last time she encountered material that was new to her.
There are a significant number of resources and support organizations that can provide material, lesson plans, cooperative support, and many other things for those who aren't experts in a given field. I know many groups who collectively trade subjects leaning on friends who have a particular specialization.
If you teach your child how to learn on their own, they will be able to, at some point, take over their own education. That's what happen with myself and my two brothers. We all started taking primary responsibility for learning as we matured, and going into high school only occasionally leaned on our mom for assistance in a given subject.
The important thing here isn't that you as a parent know everything, but that you as a parent are willing to leverage the resources at your disposal and to invest time in learning when you need it.
Personally I learned nothing (edit: not much) in school, was bullied, it was an awful experience and all I remember is watching the clock all day waiting for it to pass while daydreaming. Elementary school was like one year to learn to make additions, one year multiplication, for how many hours in school? To finally get a lot of children struggling to read in 6th grade. Middle school was more or less the same for me. I feel like I was the subject of an ideology too.
I read this essay a few years ago and it really resonated, it does obviously a way better job at putting my feeling into words: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
My small town school had instances of missing teeth, broken jaws, one kid beaten far enough to require hospitalization for 2 weeks, etc. 10 years later, the popular kids say that there was no bullying and it was all intended in good fun. My therapist didn't even believe me at first when I discussed the things that were going on at my school, but luckily I do have some reminders of those times on visible places.
Your school sounds awful, I'm sorry. I went to a pretty diverse school with >2000 students, so there was some violence, but it was either mutual or gang-related. Petty teenager dickishness existed, but nothing like the kind of Stephen King bullies you describe. As far as I know, at least.
I admit I could've been oblivious, but for that to be possible already indicates a friendlier environment than these descriptions.
I think partly because I never had the fine tuned sense of social interaction that many are naturally blessed with and paired with a dangerous tendency to let pigheaded curiosity be a guiding principle.
But, the the stuff it has taught me is indispensable. It was never taught explicitly, but without school I would have grown up completely oblivious of the invisible walls, thorns and highways that inhabit the society we live in.
Like if you want to infiltrate into a rebel base as a spy, you would want to spend a lot of time learning their mannerisms and adopting a persona. School helped me tremendously in fitting in, because my type of person would have certainly ended up an outcast in this society, if I was to be homeschooled.
As for education at high schools/middle schools, that also really depends. States usually have a teaching certificate/degree as needed, but sometimes a math degree is fine for teaching a math class even if you haven't taken any classes on education. Typically this happens in cases where there's a shortage of teachers for a subject. It doesn't help that a lot of states pay pretty mediocre for teachers.
I can say personally one of the high schools I went to, most if not all of the teachers had not done a degree in education and their background was pretty much entirely having studied the associated subject in college. I think for my other high school my teachers typically had education backgrounds, but even there I remember my chemistry teacher did not (she happened to be excellent anyway). My chemistry teacher had a chemical engineer background instead and wound up choosing to teach.
Extra anecdote I know my dad has been teaching for decades now as a professor, but back when he got his PhD he never TAed. He had 0 teaching experience/education until he taught his first class. I think TA requirements are less common in europe which is where got his PhD, although he did get it awhile ago so maybe things have changed since then.
You can get more effective education from a couple of hours employing an educator to work 1-1 or in small groups; you can get more effective socializing from going to sports and hobby clubs which don't have to be segregated by age and where you can leave if it isn't working out - this teaches you how to value your time.
This. I haven't read a single comment on Facebook from anyone complaining that their kids will get less knowledge this year.
If this flailing response from the US gov't is typical, we can expect incompetence and denial to make coordinated response to outbreaks impossible. Even a sane administration would have limited options without universal healthcare, a strong social safety net so that people can survive without jobs, and dare I say a Green New Deal to drive the economy and avoid the next catastrophe.
Antibiotic resistance is a looming threat to modern healthcare, and covid-19 may worsen it: https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-may-worsen-the-antibiot... If antibiotics lose their effectiveness, the world will not be the same.
It's also not possible to understate the threat of the potential spread of anti-science sentiment, including anti-vaxxers. Good policies could be defeated by enough people simply refusing to follow them.
TL;DR: The benefit of home schooling protecting people from disease will remain relevant.
This is probably the biggest factor.
I can't imagine being schooled and not being socially mal-adjusted.
The big problem is that most of the socializing we know, is never explicitly taught, rather it's implicitly imprinted on us as we go through the same stages of life. Skip one of those, and it becomes immediately visible.
In a less egregious example, in Grad School, it took less than an hour of knowing someone to intuit if they have ever had to share their private space with someone else before. (ie. if they dormed in UG or shared rooms growing up). Similarly, spending your formative years in a non-standard environments leads to mannerisms that people similarly pick up on. Often, the differences are not taken kindly.
Socialization has never been the exclusive domain of the School Building/Environment. I would expect the most significant factor in any person's socialization skills would be the parents, as those are the people the child spends most the first 6 years of their life interacting with. And that doesn't change when a child goes to school. They'll still spend a more significant amount of time around their own family than with other people.
And who says that a school building is the only place that a child is going to encounter people who aren't in their own family? Churches, sports, a child's own neighborhood, and a wide array of social opportunities exist outside of school yards and classrooms. All offer opportunities for a child to encounter people who are different from them.
And, though anecdotal, I have met just as many socially maladjusted people who have gone to public or private schools as I have in the homeschool communities I've been a part of.
In case I wasn't clear in the above - if you went to school in a middle or upper class area, count your lucky stars, and consider the fact that your experience may not be representative of everyone's.
affluential = affluent + influential
I believe that a side benefit of home education is that the process does not destroy a persons respect for learning and accomplishment.
And if you’ve never met a religious homeschooler then your sample size is quite skewed. According to the Department of Education they account for more than 66% of homeschoolers.
Home schooling has a number of outsize advantages that neither public nor private school has:
* Individualized attention and instruction especially in the early grades.
* An emphasis on self learning and self instruction in the later grades.
* It is more time efficient allowing young children more time for play.
* It encourages development of social skills by imitating adults not you peers. In my particular circle of home schooled children this resulted in being more comfortable holding a conversation with other adults and in general less problematic social behaviors with other children.
* In many of our cases including my own personal case it resulted in a better education than the public school was capable of providing. (I was on the path to failing if my parents had not intervened in this way.)
The trade off is that our family had to be single income for most of my childhood and thus very low income. We were poor though I didn't know it at the time. My mom and dad had to sacrifice quite a bit to make it work. Home schooling requires a large investment in money and time to be done efectively.
I by no means think that home schooling is for everyone. My wife and I had to choose a different route for our family due to a number of personal circustances. However for those who are prepared and capable of doing what it takes it can be a superior education for many children.
I also do not think that public school is evil. It's an incredible tool to empower people to better themselves. But like homeschooling it's effectiveness is a function of the community and society they are in being willing to make the tradeoffs and sacrifices needed to have an effective education system.
For those families who are in a society where that is not the case home schooling can provide a way out where there might not have been any other way.
When learning a language, the worst thing you can do is practice with fellow learners. It encourages propagation of mistakes, and can result in a miniature broken dialect among your group. I can see an argument that socialization is similar.
I might look at working remotely more often after this is over. My commute isn't bad, around 30 minutes (half of it's walking, which is nice to stretch my legs), but it might be nice to work from home just to have my own space and wear nothing but underpants for a day or two a week.
It would also be nice to go on some "workations", visiting another city/country and working during the week and doing vacation things in the evenings and weekend. I've got friends and family I want to visit, but I only get 4 weeks of paid leave a year. Most of them also work during the week so it would be a good way to spend my time.
I haven’t visited other countries, but I do working visits every other month when I see my family. Best benefit is keeping normal structure/routine while having more time to visit.
One of the things that a lot of people used to say before the pandemic was that chatting on Slack is wasting time. However, without something like Slack your productivity can just go down to zero. To be fair, I'm completely happy with IRC. I'm also completely happy with email. But you need to be spending time typing out those thoughts and receiving thoughts from your teammates. It seems counter-productive, but it's really important.
Especially because I'm 9 timezones away from my colleagues it's particularly tough -- there is nobody to chat to when I'm working. So what I do is just start a monologue on IRC. I start a thread (if I'm being kind... sometimes I forget) and I just type what I'm doing: "I've started story X. I ran into problem A, but I fixed it with technique T. Boy this part of the code stinks. What do you guys think about refactoring next time we get a chance? WTH??? How does B work? It just looks borken. Oh... Derp. I figured it out. I thought it did R, but actually it does S".
This makes a massive difference. One thing it does is show your colleagues what you are doing. It also shows them that you are doing something. It also forces you to do something even when you don't feel like it. But it also allows your colleagues to join your monologue and turn it into a dialog (I wonder if it used to be spelled dialogue...). Even if they only type "LOL! I know, right? That code is the worst!" it's enough. Someone has touched you. Someone cares.
In the best cases you get, "Oh wait! You need to do Y when you do that otherwise the data will be corrupt" followed by, "Hey, let's get together in chat and take a look at this together". Because otherwise you get your PR in and people are shitting all over it and you think everybody hates you (and they feel exactly the same way). In the absence of information, the mind imagines a hostile environment. I don't know why, but it just seems to work that way. So if people are not regularly touching minds, then you just end up getting more and more grouchy.
Taking some vacation can help to get your head in a better place, but just make sure that you look at your work situation and realise that you need to change it to make it better. Thinking that you will work harder (or better) and that it will solve the problem is the typical mistake. Once you have a work habit that works for you, it will not be difficult. You do not need to work harder or concetrate better. You need to work differently.
Hope that helps you out. Feel free to email me if you would like other pointers. The way you seem to be feeling is really common and I have a lot of experience with it ;-)
I agree with that and would add that I think a huge part of the difficulty comes from a rift in culture. If a CEO does not consciously make an effort bridge the culture between remote and in-office work, it creates a strange divide that chokes collaboration and can even be catastrophic to turnover.
Having a mix of remote and non-remote can work great, just keep in mind there's a particularly difficult dynamic that will constantly need management and maintenance.
Still it's hard for people who aren't used to it.
There's going to be a lot of that. I know a couple people working in big orgs where major decisions like going paperless on certain forms -- which they had begged for for years, and had numerous meetings to work out how they could ever be paperless, and what the path to get there would look like, target dates, etc. -- suddenly happened one day to the next, because it had to be done.
Will be interesting to look at business management changes in the future. What do decisions look like if you just say they simply have to happen?
My kids are being schooled by their teachers remotely, not by me - this process has little in common with "traditional homeschooling" other than the room it happens in, everything else is different.
Oh man, this is the truest thing I've heard since the quarantine started.
I loved that my team had a flexible WFH policy year round. On days with chores, I could stay at home and get some work done. I could travel while working. If I work up late or on the wrong side of the bed, I could avoid the trouble of dressing up and just login while brewing myself a coffee.
But now, I hate it. I've realized, I love remote work precisely because I can work from the office the rest of the time. The loss of productivity, communication and socialization doesn't feel like much if it is 1 day a week.
But, all the time. God No!
For me personally, I can do my work just fine, I just miss being around other my coworkers and having a clear separation between my work environment and my home environment. I look forward to returning to my office when it's possible.
For example, I had a good experience working from home before Covid 2-3 days of the week while the kids were at school and kindergarten; however, in the current circumstances the work from home is very, very different due to the need to combine it with doing childcare at the same time.
I mean, consider evaluating the merits and drawbacks of working in an office during a mandated "bring your kids to the office" day.
One outcome I expect will be fairly common is that some subset of people will happily rush back to the office as soon as it's safe to do so. And they'll find out that many of their coworkers aren't in nearly as big a hurry to shift back to the office full-time and will shift to continue working remotely a significant percentage of the time.
Will depend on the company and the work of course. But I suspect that people who really like to have their whole team physically with them on a day-to-day basis aren't going to like the shift that will happen in many cases.
Of course some people will hate it, but horses for courses.
You switch to being a single income family.
One parent, most usually the mother, gives up their career progression for the duration of their children's education.
Actual homeschooling isn't that difficult for the simple reason that there is a massive amount of resources available online - from distance learning organisations or individual tutors offering tuition on specific subjects, to distance learning organisations handling the whole curriculum, to mixing and matching DIY learning together with enlisting the help of distance learning organisations for more 'difficult' subjects - think Maths, Chemistry and Physics (the route we took).
It just depends on how deep your pockets are and your level of commitment i.e. if the homeschooling parent is willing to put in the hours to prep ahead of lessons or they'd prefer to leave it all up to a distance learning organisation and they just act as the facilitator.
We're currently putting our two girls through UK GCSEs, it's a mix of my wife teaching them English and a couple of others subjects and me teaching them Computer Studies, and us then also paying for online tuition in Spanish and the services of a local Music teacher.
Furthermore, it's not uncommon for homeschooling groups to arrange to have adult tutors for some subjects, especially in the higher grades.
> I know that by the time our child was in 2nd grade he was already doing most of his lessons without any adult intervention,
You're very fortunate. For my kids that kinda/ sorta true for the high-school one. And from what I've seen, they're not the exception. It even gets worse with teenage children, because they'll challenge your authority - so while they may work on stuff that teachers gave them, they won't easily take suggestions from you (e.g. what to study, for the high-school exams).
It's one thing to thoughtfully decide that it is best for your family to outsource education for various reasons. It's quite another to think that it is, by default, impossible to do it yourself.
> It's quite another to think that it is, by default, impossible to do it yourself.
It's not, if they chose the same career path as I did, or my wife did. But I don't see how we could plausibly expose them to different options. Case in point - the older child plans to study architecture; the exam involves quite specialized drawing skills. Both of us would have extremely limited knowledge to guide her.
This is a ridiculous comparison. There are a lot of things I took a class or two in that I am not qualified to teach.
Most people are not qualified to teach most subjects at s high level.
I’m a professor and there are only certain topics that I am an expert in. I could tech myself high school chemistry again, but it’s been a few decades.
I’d say the majority of people who are still employed and have no kids are having a fairly pleasant time at home.