Public School: A qualified teacher with proven subject matter knowledge who is accountable, a curated curriculum designed by teaching and subject matter experts, as well as a meaningful diploma which actually lets colleges/employers understand roughly what you were taught and how you performed
Homeschooling: some random mom, with some random level, including potentially none at all, of qualifications and subject matter knowledge, and little to no curriculum supervision, and resulting in zero credible or meaningful certification
You do the math
Does…does she think teachers can only teach one child at a time?
Does she think teachers teach kids in series and not in parallel?
She doesn’t know the difference
Well then she’s surely not going to be able to deal with the students’ resistance
It’s fine, because you do the math.
Why 3 hours?
30 kids is more than I’d want, but I get it.
Yeah all the home school kids in my neighborhood are done by like 10v00AM and are outside playing. I asked one of the parents about it once and she said that she gives them a worksheet to read while they eat breakfast, then reads something to them, then has them fill out a worksheet. Takes 3 hours or less, then the kids are bored and wander the neighborhood until their friends get home from the schoolbus.
I can’t imagine there’s a whole lot of learning going on in that little amount of time.
“Teacher” seems to be a flexible term here.
There’s a big difference between someone who’s studied and practiced teaching a given subject and explaining it in a way that kids will understand, and a parent who knows only what they have read in the textbook.
And in a school, it’s not “1 teacher” - a kid will have a team of teachers, each with their own speciality. I think my English teacher would have done a pretty dodgy job if she’d had to teach us chemistry or biology.
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My mother/teacher was a product of our public school system and I have no idea how good of a student she was, but it didn’t matter because she had this amazing Christ-inspired curriculum that did all the work for her.
I’m not sure how typical my experience was, but for my mom, she was more drawn to the philosophical idea of home schooling and controlling what your children learn than the actual learning work.
In my family, we had bible together in the morning, and then broke to our separate rooms to work on math, social studies, science, etc.
A few things to note:
- Nobody but my mom checked our work - there was no equivalence or state testing. I mean I’m sure there was in our state but we didn’t participate
- My mom isn’t very smart and really didn’t have the energy to hound us to do our work anyway. We would get yelled at for not doing our assignments but again, more for the fact of disobeying here - the education itself wasn’t really important
- Pretty much our entire curriculum was Abeka, which is a garbage curriculum designed to substitute Christianity for actual learning
It won’t surprise you to learn that neither me nor any of my siblings went to college.
When I got my first real job, I was very gently informed that the “diploma” I had presented, which my dad had printed out of an MS word template, was not a valid document. Subsequently I had to quickly get a GED - which was the first and only time I’ve ever had any kind of sense of my actual education level compared to any kind of standard.
I still don’t have a confident answer to what Algebra is. At one point not long ago, I was putting together a somewhat complex formula in Excel and I wondered to myself, is this algebra?
I still genuinely don’t know, in case anyone wants to elucidate.
Simplest way you do algebra - item costs $5, you give the cashier $10, how much do you get back?
I’m sorry to hear about your upbringing. It must have been tough to adjust to adulthood.
Without getting into the abstract definition, algebra is basically just arithmetic (“regular math”) using variables (like “x”) to represent unknown values. Typically you’re trying to find a value (a regular number) or an expression (a relationship between values and variables) equal to your variable.
When you “solve for x”, you’re doing algebra. If your Excel formulas reference cells as variables (e.g. “=A1*3”) then yes that is algebra, since the cell can take different values.
Okay yeah that’s what I was thinking - particularly the cell reference as variable. Thank you for a great explanation.
I literally worked in finance for a major company for a period of time…
Algebra is doing maths with unknown values. Things like 3 x A = 6 Where A is “something we dont know yet” - so “3 times something is 6”
In this case I think perhaps we can see that A should be 2, but we can steadily learn techniques to solve more and more complicated puzzles like this.
If you get really good at these sorts of puzzles, you can learn to turn a lot of real world problem into this sort of puzzle, and often you can learn things about the problem by looking at the maths.
We can use this to calculate all sorts of stuff, and its a base of a lot of maths that comes later which is used for basically all science, engineering, accounting, programming etc.
Thanks for sharing! This was essentially my experience growing up, I am old now and never bounced back fully in math either.
I was the oldest of 8, so much of my time was helping my siblings with schoolwork on top of my own “self learning” Problem is most of our family is nerodivergent, undiagnosed until adulthood… So you know none of us got the help we needed either. Another flaw in homeschooling as you dont have people trained to pick up dyslexia early, so kids struggle too much.
Your comment helped me feel that someone out there understands, thanks! :)
Easiest way to explain algebra imo is that it has variables, like x or y or whatever.
I’m a college professor and I’m not going to go around pretending to teach anything that isn’t related to my actual field.
Technically a home school teacher is a “teacher” but too many times that’s quite a stretch
He can’t do the English either, judging by his comma splice.
I was home schooled in addition to attending normal school. I think my old man was qualified though to teach math and science though. He was a nuclear physicist.
I’ve met plenty of incredibly smart people who aren’t effective at relaying their knowledge to less educated audiences. Hopefully your old man was a good teacher in addition to being a nuclear physicist.
He was. Kept me well ahead of the class in terms of reading, writing, mathematics and science. I think he understood one of the fundamental requirements of being in academia.
One might be the smartest person in the room, but if they cannot convey that intelligence and knowledge to other people, you are essentially a chimpanzee with tenure.
The social skills were learn from interacting with peers is probably more important than any technical skills the school can teach.
Everyone seems to understand that’s it’s not what you know it’s who you know. Even then, being skilled at dealing with people and appeasing egos will get you further in most careers than anything else. But hardcore Christians will say that “who you know” phrase with Straight face, then turn around and make sure their kids don’t know anyone. That’ll surely set them up for success…
its not 1 teacher for 7 hours, its 7 teachers for 7 hours of barely passable teaching content.
Yeah homeschooling is not good. Its code for religious brainwashing. At least in middle US.
Every homeschooled person ive known is just weird. And not good weird.
Good old mythical man-hour
Its like saying, if we put 9 women together we can make a baby in a month
A good tutor could probably manage to teach what a kid learns in 7 hours of public school in 3 hours to a single student to be fair. But 3 tutors couldn’t teach a single student in 1 hour
I am a homeroom teacher in a primary school (private school, not in the US). Homeroom teachers at my school have 4 hours a day with our students. In the lower grades, we teach “core subjects” (math, reading, writing, science and social studies) in three of those four hours, and the other hour is social-emotional team building and language activities (speaking/listening and some phonics). In the upper grades each teacher is in charge of teaching one subject for the whole grade level, so I teach math for three hours and then I have the social-emotional/language hour with my homeroom class.
The other hours of the day are what some schools call “related arts” or “special area” classes – music, art, PE, etc. Our students also have a 30-minute lunch break and 70 minutes of recess time over the course of the day.
We follow US curriculum for the core academic subjects.
I absolutely believe that students can get through “what a kid learns in 7 hours of public school” in 3 hours of homeschool. School is designed to fill most of a work day so parents can work a full day, not because we have that much academic content to cover.
But I also know kids can miss out on some really important academic rigor (especially in math and science), socialization, and/or exposure to arts if their parents aren’t well-informed in their approach to homeschool.
Homeschooling, at least in the U.S., is actually one of the cheapest ways to get your child a quality education. The majority of public schools are effectively worthless, and for the few private schools that actually produce results, you’re practically paying college tuition for your kid to go there. It is the most time intensive on yourself though, since you’re basically doing the work of 6-7 teachers when it comes to preparing all your lesson plans. However, when we’re seeing more and more states just completely give up on education, where evolution is presented as a competing theory to creationism, I can respect someone taking charge and taking their child’s education into their own hands to ensure they are receiving an education on par with their European peers.
Now, is christy_faith_homeschool going to be providing that kinda quality, fact-based education to her children? I’d highly doubt it, which goes into the really shitty part of homeschooling; there might as well be no oversight. If there is any, I’ve personally not seen it at the scholarship company I work at. I know there are boards, but when we see a kid come in with 36 faith-based courses and only 8 academic ones, with no foreign language included, I really struggle to imagine that an unbiased third party has verified that child’s education.
You’ve never met anyone that’s been home schooled…
As “worthless” as public education is, it’s a thousand times better than 99% home schooled
Honey, I work at a scholarship office. I review academic transcripts for a living. Sure, I’m not meeting them in person, but I’ve seen more applications than you’ve met people.
Yes, the religious fundies are problematic, but there’s plenty of geniuses whose poor parents had to brush up on their linear algebra and quantum theory. That’s not even mentioning the surprising number that end up just taking courses at local colleges and universities and counting them for high school credit. There are homeschoolers in the US far smarter than you. They’re just not a majority.
Starting off with “Honey” discounts anything that comes after. I’m glad you live in some magical land where homeschooling works but it ain’t 95%of US
Your assertion that they had never met anyone homeschooled was more disrespectful than the “honey”. I think you can tank it.
homeschooling has significantly more variety in quality than public school, and the people for which it went well don’t generally advertise it.
The only homeschooled person I know works at Google
The only homeschooled person I know just got roped into an MLM scheme.
I don’t think having no classmates and a teacher without an education in pedagogy accelerates your learning speed by a factor of 2.333
