My family’s unlikely homeschooling journey
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The only solution IMO is the expensive one - more individualized curricula, smaller classes, more personal attention from the teacher to the pupil and less focus on standardized tests and grades.
It also turns out that the smartest kids don’t even need that much attention. They just need access to resources and challenging material and a supervisor to help them set and achieve goals. It really doesn’t cost much to society to provide gifted kids with what they need and at the same time free teachers up to spend more time with those who need it.
I think we all know the main reason we as a society don’t fund gifted and talented education: spite. Parents of average kids hold a special animosity toward gifted kids for no other reason than envy. They would be far better off finding ways to get the most problematic and disruptive kids out of their children’s classrooms but that doesn’t satisfy people the way seeing a gifted program close does.
Same in sports by the way: most "gifted" players are born at the start of the year: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fivethirtyeight.com/features/wh...
Conclusion: at young ages, you should be very careful what you call "gifted" when you place kids with almost 1 year difference in the same group.
Link with google removed.
(whenever you copy and paste it, you can just delete the "www.google.com/amp/s/" part and the URL will now point to the real website.)
I also don't think you appreciate the value of instruction as a learning tool and the skills required to truly teach people - empathy, paying attention to cues to keep an up to date model of the student, language skills, clarity of thought to adapt your explanation on the fly. All of these are real skills, which it is absolutely worth teaching the gifted math prodigy instead of rushing them into research ASAP - they are humans, not theorem-factories.
I have first hand experience with this, as a former high school dropout, now close to completing a math degree just before the age of 40. The cost to the school system to keep me engaged rather than bored and ignored would’ve been minuscule compared to all of the lost tax revenue from me staying out of the workforce for over a decade and a half.
None of that has anything to do with forcing gifted kids into math research. And there are a hell of a lot more gifted kids than just the Olympiad gold medallist prodigies. I could’ve learned calculus in elementary school but I am far, far away from someone like Terence Tao.
I'm all about making school a valuable, engaging experience for everyone, including gifted children. But it needs to scale and be progressive, not just pile more inequalities and gate keeping into the system.
And if we are talking about the lost tax revenue and the "worth" of education, having the gifted kids teach their peers for better socialisation and so increasing the floor of math and other education will have a much larger impact. Progress doesn't come from great men, it comes from the world changing.
Also, if we're expecting gifted kids to work as teachers' aides at the expense of their own education, shouldn't we be compensating them for it?
Or should the gifted kids just be grateful for the opportunity? If it's actually good for them, are parents just being irrational by focusing on challenging them academically instead of enrolling them in a teacher's college for tots?
You might call that gifted.
Surprisingly she is also taller than most kids in her class.
Minor detail that you can totally ignore: she was born 2nd of January.
The kids could be tested with games, then presented new stuff or roll back to some older stuff based on how well they are progressing.
In Canada, French immersion is an option in public schools starting from kindergarten. Personally, I think it’s a good proxy for sorting classrooms where parents care versus English-only classrooms where the parents seem less involved.
I’ve heard comments from parents who deliberately avoided French immersion for various reasons but these often stemmed from a lack of a growth mindset (it’s confusing for my child, I won’t be able to help them with homework, etc.). This obviously has implications about how kids conduct themselves beyond their home.
This is less of an issue if children are raised in the nuclear families like in the olden days, but these days what other avenues are left where children can learn something in a group and form long term friendships other than a school?
In particular, I retained a childhood friend who was a street playmate. The rest of my friends last through middle and high school until they moved away, and in some case drifted apart.
EDIT: You can also check your local library, as the librarians are likely to know of at least one person who homeschools and might be able to connect you.
I suggest starting with your state resources (assuming you are in the USA). Here are a couple for Oregon: - http://www.ohen.org/ - https://www.thehomeschoolmom.com/homeschooling-in-oregon/
At the time that I was homeschooling my children, that was enough info to lead me to various parent and meet-up groups.
Something that isn't mentioned much - just like getting a tutor in college, its pretty easy for a parent group to pitch in for an occasional day of tutoring or lecture/review from an expert.
Negative concerns about socialization was never an issue in my experience or from what I saw with other homeschoolers, rather the opposite.
When getting started, make an honest appraisal of your teaching capabilities and home life. Be ready to admit where you have areas of weakness and stop when you reach the end of your capability and don't have support or a parent group to assist in those areas. Be ready to experiment with different learning approaches and look at it as an opportunity for yourself as much as for your child.
Like anything else in life, you and your child will get out of the experience what is put into it. Success takes effort. I think (just my opinion) too many parents let public school do the parenting. When I first started with my 3 year old (who was already reading and doing math by that age) I created a simple set of goals and a project plan and then reiterated through it as I learned more about homeschooling. By the time my second child started to read and write I had a solid sense of direction and a plan that I was able to loosely follow for the next dozen years.
One last tip: don't stick to the public school schedule. Life lasts all day long, all year long. Activities may change with the seasons, but learning doesn't need to stop just becuase summer came. Be flexible. Take lots of field trips. Have fun... OK, that was more than one last tip.
Compared to that I'd absolutely say homeschooling (even with occasional events and activities) is quite isolating.
With homeschooling, the parent sees what's happening and can protect their child. Nobody will protect them at school - especially if the school lies to the parents to save face/protect teachers. And nobody will ever pay for the destroyed family relationships this produces.
How is a kid supposed to learn to deal with the uncomfortable situations when everything they do is shut down and punished by a teacher but they don't care about the actual problem and it's perpetrators? How is a 7 year old kid supposed to stand up to the teachers?
In school you spent 6 hours each day on recess/lunch break? Because I'd argue that in most classes, you aren't exactly supposed to be socializing, but rather, you know, following the class you're in
Socialising doesn't just mean unrelated chatter.
When I sat next to other kids there weren't discussions, there was fighting and stealing my stuff and teachers not reacting because they sat me next to the precious ones who couldn't do anything wrong so "they keep an eye on me" - and then punishing me for my missing stuff. When we had to do projects I was the only one working and the other kids ignoring me on purpose - but somehow that was my fault too and I got a bad grade because "it was supposed to be a team project".
Fuck schools. It's not my fault I was born with ADHD - and if you force me into the school then it's on you to learn to deal with it. But that's not going to happen - and thus homeschooling is the way for my children.
Things like a chess club, book club, lego robotics team, renting out a gym, doing science experiments, playing dungeons and dragons, and so on. This was slightly before the era of kids having cell phones, but we made use of landlines to keep in touch as well.
That said, it obviously depends a huge amount on the parents, and requires a huge amount of time and effort on their part. While I think it was a mostly positive experience for me, there are very few people I could recommend do it with their kids. The strong impression I got was also that it became less effective as you became high school aged, but I went back to a regular school before that.
We still pulled them out and are now homeschooling them, largely because of the "socialization" at the traditional school. My oldest in particular was retreating behind a social facade, and his innate interest in just about everything was dwindling, choked off by the social pressures of both his classmates and the sick game of "achievement" that schools present.
I'm not going to say that everything is perfect or even that everything is better. We're a family of introverts, and we all struggle with socialization, but for him the social situations that we seek out are doing far more for him than the forced interactions of traditional school.
And you really have a huge amount of control and opportunities for socialization when you're homeschooling. There are get-togethers with other homeschoolers. There are in-person classes. There are things that would traditionally be called "extracurricular" but we see as core parts of what a childhood should involve. Some people form microschools, or have parents teach rotating topics. The online stuff isn't disconnected from other humans, and as the author of this piece says, it's not the "let's transplant our usual methods on top of Zoom!" bullshit that so many people have suffered with.
There certainly are tradeoffs and tension. If you want self-paced, it's hard to stick with a known cohort of other kids. It requires quite a bit of privilege to have the time and opportunity to shepherd this stuff through. I am greatly indebted to my wife for setting things up and managing them. There's no way it would happen if we were both still working full-time. And it won't work as well for some people—it's not the same for every kid or every family.
That's kind of the whole point.
My homeschool upbringing included team sports, solo sports clubs, debate leagues, sleepovers, group field trips, scouting, community college, and various co-op models over the years.
Here's the difference--you're more likely to have mixed-age groups (particularly for elementary) and, critically, you're going to have much heavier adult involvement and guidance.
This gives a huge benefit: The social culture isn't defined by the kids. You have highly engaged adults acting as role models and vetted by the community. There's no critical mass of same-age peers defining the culture despite the best efforts of a handful of overworked administrators.
Additionally, there's usually a large amount of community collaboration and resource sharing. A key co-op for me in later years was essentially a group of local professionals who each taught their respective fields (writing, design, forensics, mathematics, etc.). Some were other parents with kids in the program, others were local experts. You still have a peer group spread between the classes--I had perhaps 20 in my immediate circle of a similar age, and a few hundred I met statewide during competitions--but by high school, the education essentially becomes student-led private tutoring with parental guidance, with a small-group shell and social extra-curriculars.
Absolutely. This is completely dysfunctional and unnatural and I don’t know how anyone thought it was a good idea.
It’s the reason we spend a lot of money to send our kids to private school. I don’t actually think curriculum, etc., makes a tangible difference. But our school puts K-12 all on one campus with small grade level sizes and lots of opportunities for older kids to teach younger kids. (E.g. summer camp activities for elementary school students where most of the counselors are high school students.)
In many ways, school just slows you down. But I liked my parents' way. That let me go to school and have that shared experience with other kids while not holding me back.
I wonder how I can do that for my kids. Unfortunately, homework is part of the grade and you can't tell the teachers to skip it for your kid. Or maybe you can.
Yes, and that's not even accounting for bullying if you are unlucky
This is the biggest curiosity killer. Instead of helping them it somehow teaches the kids to become a bunch of obedient rule followers. Maybe that's the intended effect.
It's definitely one thing I like very much about American education: it appears to be much less mechanical. Though unless you go to magnet schools or specific private schools, the peer group is usually weak.
if self-pacing is possible, not doing it seems like a huge unforced error in education policy
As a result, great amounts of efforts are spent to get these slower kids to the pace of faster kids. It never actually has any non-superficial effect. If it seems to, it’s almost universally some more or less apparent selection bias going on.
This disappoints the educators greatly, especially as they are under pressure to deliver the equal outcomes they promised. The outcome is that more and more resources are spent on the slower kids, at the expense of the faster kids. At this point, parents of the faster kids (who very often are people of means, and this is by no means an accident) remove their kids from public education, and move them to private schools. This is often decried as some kind of moral failing, as if they and their kids owe something to the schools that fail to serve them, and for which they continue to pay anyway, despite not using them.
This is not unforced error, this is the result of the incentives embedded in the education system, which are, in turn, a result of unreasonable expectations put on it. We shouldn’t expect that everyone learn the same amount at school. This is never going to be the case, and is hurting everyone in the system.
Yeah, and changing it will cause revolt. It would be going back to saying people "just aren't equal", ie. the idea of nobility. And if there's one guarantee in life: it very quickly won't be actual achievement that determines if you get ahead in such a system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...
E.g. Germany
https://amp.dw.com/en/european-court-rules-against-german-ho...
Yes. As a fun aside, my understanding is that is the reason for a baffling (to people outside the UK) anomaly.
In the UK, if you there is a school you have to pay for (ie not a government school) that is called a public school. Everywhere else in the world that would be called a private school - a much more logical-sounding name.
The reason is that if in say the 15th century you were well off but weren't quite rich enough to pay for tutors for your children you might be able to send them to a public school (eg Eton college) instead. There were no government schools at the time, so schools that were open to the public were called public schools to differentiate from private tuition.
A school that you don't pay for is usually referred to as a state school.
My eldest is studying to become a K12 teacher and it is a 4 year degree course so I don't think Zoom and parents are going to replace her soon.
My youngest is a "aspy" and when she went to high school it was a disaster - she ended up in a clinic for treatment of depression and one of the triggers was high school.
Square peg in a round hole.
We fortunately found a tutor that had taught kids with learning disabilities and was close to home and enrolled her in an online school platform for the materials and exams.
She had to drop Physics/Chemistry as there was no way for her to do practical lab work even at another place.
She went to the tutor's home during the day - helped other kids when not busy and completed Grade 12 over two years - she is now studying IT programming first year at a university.
It was the best decision we made ever - home schooling but letting a professional do it and for the right reasons - "We don't trust the govt" or "install my morality/belief system" is shitty reasons IMHO.
As my wife Rachel said in the intro, this post is really about our particular experiences. It's not an attempt to convince anyone else to do the same thing.
Home-schooling is very different to what I expected. There are things today that just weren't available to previous generations. In particular, there's a lot of well-designed adaptive apps and websites that take kids through topics at a speed that's appropriate for them. This has meant, in our case, that our daughter has avoided the extreme boredom that she faced when she was at a traditional school, and is now enjoying her learning much more. It's particularly good for topics like mathematics, where if you start getting behind it can become nearly impossible to make progress, and if you're ahead then you might just zone out.
Also, Zoom is a game-changer. Our daughter gets tutoring in coding from an MIT computer science grad (who also minored in music and teaches her piano too), in physics from a physicist, in art from a professional artist, in Japanese from a native Japanese speaker, and so forth. Her tutors are from all over the world and are extremely diverse. This has been a lot of fun for her, and has opened her eyes to different ways of thinking about the world. Without Zoom and friends, we'd have been restricted to people that are in our local geographic area. We've had a lot of help from Modulo (https://www.modulo.app).
Another nice thing about Zoom is that the vast majority of her learning occurs in a social environment with 1-5 other kids. We've found that this is a great group size, and is more social than most larger classrooms -- the kids are never told to keep quiet, but instead encouraged to have lots of discussion and ask questions whenever they come up. There's lots of diversions to follow whatever the kids get interested in along the way.
I've personally spent a lot of time reading academic papers and books about education and listening to lots of interviews with teachers. There are all kinds of fascinating insights that just haven't been brought into regular schools so far, but we're able to take advantage of in all our daughter's lessons. For example, we use a lot of spaced repetition, and teach her tutors how to take advantage of it too (e.g see http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html).
PS. thanks for the excellent fast.ai course!
Glad you liked course.fast.ai :D
Barring some _exceptionally_ unusual cases - lets say 4th std dev cases, I feel, sharply, that homeschooling is a bad idea.
On a broad social level, it removes expected bodies of knowledge suitable for having a useful society; on an individual level, it leaves them in a bad place for interacting with peers. I also believe that most parents are not qualified to actually supervise modern education past a certain grade level- being a parent is a remarkably easy thing to start doing, after all.
The social interaction is a profound and subtle problem. There's this thing about dealing with the mass of peers that homeschooling doesn't teach - but the work world and other situations require. This is not going to come with homeschooling.
I also note, in passing, that I am assuming that parents are _trying_ to do exceptional education and are not trying to play particularly ideological games. In other words, something roughly analogous to normal schooling goals. However. This assumption does not hold true in much of homeschooling discourse. Much of homeschooling is an explicit religious approach; some of the homeschooling curricula and groups are actually a religious-political project attempting to build political power with an alternative education system outside. So discussions of homeschooling have to address that elephant in the room.
Also in passing, any homeschooling policy worth its salt should ensure that children are simply not being educationally or personally neglected; those cases do exist, unfortunately.
tl;dr: don't homeschool. take it from a former homeschooled kid. send the kid to a good public school, please.
Personally, I hated school, and I think it had a strongly net negative impact on me. It's not for everyone.
What I learned then and over time is the difference parents make for someone who cares. Looking back, that was a critical difference why my family had great academic success and other families - same homeschool group, my friends - struggled. My parents expected academic performance. Not just "doing ok", but "knowing". Some years ago, my dad laughed that they were "Tiger Parents", around the time Dr. Chua's book came out.
I do think that my generation - late 70s - late 80s kids - is reaching an age and life stage where we can reflect on our homeschooling and assess whether it was good or bad, not just looking at the "k-12" time but holistically and how it affected our course of life.
I actually loved _being_ homeschooled, at the time. It's only as I've aged that I've grown more and more negative about it.
anyway, peace.
I want my children to be honest, thoughtful, compassionate, diligent, respectful, and courageous. These aren't society's values today so I homeschool.
I endured more than my fair share of childhood trauma. Yet, my adoptive parents presented me in church for baptism and the other sacraments. We attended Mass on a regular basis. We were sent to Catholic school and taught to cherish high moral standards for ourselves and our friends. I rejected this all for over 11 years, but I came to see the wisdom and value in such an upbringing. Now I accept the Christian faith voluntarily, with free will; there is no force or coercion or violence involved.
participation in the rituals is mandatory, lack of belief is not optional, and heaven forbid something fundamental about you cross the line (i.e. try being gay or transgender in a religious household). that little word "inculcate" puts it pretty well - indoctrination by forced repetition. you view it as passing a gift along, some bearing the end of the gift view it as torment
If it involves more then negligible amount of spanking in the "how to train your baby" style or emotional manipulation, it absolutely is coercive.
As in, there is such a thing as healthy amount of teaching your faith. There is also religious based abuse. And then there is someone saying "glaring deficiency of public school is the inability to train your child's character for most of the day" which do suggest overbearing amount of it.
Also "I am going to homeschool because my kids might have meet christian in public school" is not really a movement among atheists.
I strongly doubt that. It may have been true at some point, I don't know. It was certainly my stereotype growing up several decades ago. But now that I'm homeschooling and in contact with numerous other homeschooling families, I haven't really seen it. At all.
Other areas could certainly be different. Here, in the SF Bay Area, it's mostly about parents who see their kids just not thriving in one way or another at traditional school, and not really having any effective levers to do something about it while staying within the system. So yeah, there's an element of control, but only of the environment and opportunities available. Especially today, I'm skeptical that controlling the landscape of their peers' opinions is even possible. I guess it is for younger kids, when you could restrict their access to devices for anything but academic purposes. But generally there's just too much stuff to be doing in your own life and setting up and managing the kids' classes and activities—it'd be tough to micromanage their beliefs and values or whatever even if you wanted to. It's not that different from traditional schooling in the end.
The number of people who have good values who don't homeschool demonstrates that it is not required.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy. Wealthy people can send their kids to good public/private schools because they can afford to live places with access. But less-wealthy people may not have the option.
The social interaction piece is interesting, and may be addressed by the fact that there is massive growth in homeschooling right now. It's also easier to connect/coordinate with other families (remote or local, based on interests/age). Not a bad idea for a startup, actually!
It made me wonder: how much more would my kid know if I’d spent all this time (that I spent talking to the school) just teaching her directly?
On the policy level, removing the option to legally homeschool without some sort of court order would be my choice to start improving that; to force alignment between wealthy and poor (the wealthy don't get the option to shrug and send their kid to a good charter/private school - they have to work to improve the district). There are other angles around funding that are well known to be problematic.
I don't believe that a million homeschoolers all doing things differently is the right thing for society or for learning interaction. The point I am trying to make is that "dealing with the Public is an important skill that you don't get when its just your little clan"
For the others reading the thread (relevant bits of which are linked in the article) consistently shows that on average homeschooled students perform several percentage points higher on academic achievement tests, and a moreover a majority of studies on social development of show positive outcomes for homeschoolers compared to traditional schools. For minorities the net positives are apparently even more profound; the same article mentions a > 20% increase in academic achievement test scores for black students.
Yes, there are good and there are bad situations in all kinds of school, public and private and homeschool alike, but the data appears to be overwhelmingly in favor of homeschooling when compared to a public school.
The elephants in the room he mentions is very real thing too. Fair amount of homeschooling is explicitly social/political project. It is meant to shape both how family structure looks like (who is head of the house) and also meant to create young people that change larger society into religious one. ( Partly you can see it when you listen to homeschoolers talking about public school or even non religious people in general - frankly they often sound like aliens who got the idea from movies. )
There are some broad concerns about homeschooling that are not relevant to individual decisions. E.g. I don't care that some homeschooling parents use it as a cover for abuse/neglect because I'm not an abusive/neglectful parent. For my child, that's not a risk factor. And as you point out, it's the same for motivational factors.
My point is I don't think it was net positive. I'd estimate a net negative. I actually think I spent 10 years overcoming serious limits in post-homeschooling areas in social areas. Now, 20 years after I finished homeschool, I don't see any difference in the end between now-peers and myself, even comparing with the homeschool group I was involved in (as I mentioned, I'm on the upper end of "society's success" with that group... most were far less academic than my family).
I'm neither liberal or conservative, I'm neither. But from what I'm reading, the agenda at public schools is about as hard left, left of left-left-left, as possible. I don't want my children to be indoctrinated to the left or right. I wouldn't have my kids go to a public school where they push religion, either.
Both suck.
Just...no thanks.
What does this even mean? Examples? Who told you this? How do you think that's maintained in opposition to whatever your local district politics is?
Where are you reading this, and why do you choose to believe it?
>I have been disturbed to follow the ever-accumulating research on cardiovascular, neurological, and immune system harms that can be caused by covid, even in previously healthy people, even in the vaccinated, and even in children. While vaccines significantly reduce risk of death, unfortunately they provide only a limited reduction in Long Covid risk. Immunity wanes, and people face cumulative risks with each new covid infection (so even if you’ve had covid once or twice, it is best to try to avoid reinfections). I am alarmed that leaders are encouraging mass, repeated infections of a generation of children.
I'd love nothing more than to spend time going over areas I find fascinating with a child but I know I have my own idiosyncrasies and multiplying them for the next generation isn't doing anyone any favors. Being exposed to multiple ideas is a good way to keep you from going off the deep end.
In short: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FTsIPRgWUAALz4v?format=png&name=...
She's welcome to raise her kids however she wants. But you should keep in mind that this is very much not someone who you want to copy unless you're also basically an invalid.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/autoimmunity-m...
My kid spent pretty much continously like 1.5 month in 4-5 quarantines from school and guess what, he got COVID in between anyway, completely pointless waste of everyone's (parents/chidlren) time, because some parents had nothing better to do than ruin it for everyone else.
Btw. there is nothing really wrong with being weird, most of the people are stupid falling for whatever they are fed. Although it doesn't mean everyone weird is smart or better than majority.