> From my personal experience doing homework with my son I think a big issue that is not addressed is that kids/people are different, some don't instantly get it and most f the time the kids will not have the courage to tell the teacher that they do not understand.
You are
absolutely right. I have a unique experience with my children. Two of them are homeschooled, two attend public school. The two who are homeschooled learned to read around age five, are excellent readers and are about two years ahead in math/algebra[0]. My public school kids were a little above average students, as well. That all changed over the last two years -- partly due to pandemic/remote learning, but not because we became more actively involved in their education. My two homeschooled kids get three hours of formal education, per day, on a
busy day. When you're one-on-one with
two students, and the teacher understands the student better than any other human being on the planet, it's
really efficient[1].
Having worked remotely for a while, I told them that they have to get to know their teachers. They attended a "remote first" school which we transferred them to -- this was not a normally in-class school that had been forced to go "online only" in an unprepared manner, but one had existed for years prior and taught classes completely differently than the in-person schools. We forced them to schedule time every time it was offered to meet with their teachers. The result was an increased comfort with speaking up when they got lost. Returning to in-person schooling this year, they have kept that pattern; all of their teachers know them well -- when we pop up on video for parent-teacher conferences, we hear "Oh, you're (name omitted)'s parents!" Both are honor-roll students, now, two years in a row.
[0] That's an unscientific assessment; I use it because I regularly caught my son helping his two-years-older stepson with math homework; they were either working on the exact same concepts or they my son had done it the prior year.
[1] This works in the exact opposite direction, as well. My daughter, for a solid year and a half, would break down crying over her inability to understand her math work and would become very defiant about learning -- giving up before trying, etc -- because "it's Mom, and I can get away with these things with Mom". It's manageable, though, when you recognize that the "giving up before trying because she feels she can" is the way she expresses how she's struggling. The advantage of home schooling is that we don't have to move on to the next thing until they understand the previous enough to restore their confidence. We don't have to start summer time-off or even have it at all (it really doesn't feel any different, anyway!) if they need it.