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Locked on 07/13/2004 9:52:11 AM PDT by Admin Moderator, reason:
Hobbit Hole XIII: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1170490/posts |
Posted on 06/26/2004 8:07:15 AM PDT by HairOfTheDog
Special Wedding Edition: The Hobbit Hole XI - No One Admitted Except on Wedding Business!
New verse:
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Upon the hearth the fire is red, |
Still round the corner there may wait |
Home is behind, the world ahead, |
now THAT was snarky! hehehehe....
My dad didn't! He nearly got held back in kindergarten because he couldn't cut. Of course, he was a lefty and they only had right-hand scissors...
I also still don't know what marijuana smells like, or the best pills to get high, and I'd know that if I'd been to the local high school. Trust me.
Wish Jr a wonderful trip from us Hobbit Holers!
I am with you there! Way too many of my students have only rudimentary reading and writing skills. Sadly, many of them are even older than me.
I typically casually ask these students what sort of reading material they enjoy in their spare time. They respond, "Oh, I don't have time for that." or "I have better things to do than read."
Very sad that.
Of course that's in the public schools. It is also in the private schools. It is also in most church youth groups. It is far more pervasive than parents want to admit.
Wife spent last year tutoring a kid who got kicked out of the Christian home-school co-op (that meets at a church) for coming to school drunk.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that's only a public school problem. Trust me.
...gotta run...
I agree that it is great for the teacher to know the subject. It's been my experience that they do, but you can hold on to your idea that most math teachers majored in PE. What I wonder is, I thought it didn't matter if the teacher, when it's a homeschool parent, knew the subject because they could just buy all the lesson plans and teach out of the book?
I guess I look at the options, I look at my own experience, and I know that I cannot be all the people that taught me when I was in school. The only reason to try to be all those things for my own kids would be to shield my kids from hearing something that might make them disagree with me at home. And for me, that's not a compelling reason. My dad sortof looked forward to that challenge, I think. And you know, I heard opposing world views, and I ended up agreeing with Dad most of the time anyway. No fun huh?
*note to self* Send Jen ~brownies~ for Christmas....
KIDDING!!!
See, that's why we didn't do youth groups, either...
Homeschool co-op had very strict rules. Since the moms brought the kids, if they'd shown up drunk, I think the whole family would be asked to leave. Heh... there were rules against "public displays of affection", including holding hands or sitting too closely together...
I noticed that when I last walked through a CC campus. It now seems like an adult re-education second chance more than kids right out of school like it was when I was there. My classes were not filled with people my mom's age finally going to school, often times (because I did this for a living) to be able to stay on welfare and avoid going to work yet.
Agreed, there is a difference between a teacher who coaches and a coach who teaches. My personal experience is filled with the former rather than the latter.
Oops.. now I wanna weigh in with a personal story on this. My beloved little brother Dave graduated with a degree in PE. He always wanted to coach. He got a job coaching at a junior high his first year out of college. They also assigned him the job of teaching World Geography which disgusted him because he knew little about it.
I always loved geography and maps. That year for Christmas Dave and I played Trivial Pursuit non-stop for days. He never won but he got really disgusted because I knew virtually all the geography questions and he knew very few. The following summer, Dave was enrolled at A&M in geography classes. He felt the weight of *not* knowing his subject matter and diligently made up for his lack. He even had me give him some of my books so he could catch up during that first school year. He is a true educator IMO.
Most homeschool moms I know admit they don't always know what they're teaching. A lot of them stay two or three lessons ahead of the kids. Mom says the best thing about homeschooling is that she learned history, which she missed from being part of a social experiment in school.
Being strongly religious, governemnt school would have been more than just "hearing things we disagree with". I live in suburbia. The local high school has had pipe bombs planted, Oxycontin rings, ridiculous teen pregnancy rates, and scandals you don't want to hear about. That's what they were shielding us from. Peer pressure to smoke. Being told that the Gay-Straight Alliance is permitted, but Bible studies aren't. Being taught lies in history class. (that's not hyperbole; the textbooks are hideous)
Math and science were the only real difficulties. Yes, I miss having had a good high school physics class. But I took chem at community college. If your kid desperately wants to be a biologist, ok, I can see sending him to government high schcool, for the facilities.
Besides... homeschooling gave me the ability to study what really interested me, spend hours a day reading, and still graduate early.
Good for him! And I'll bet his students learned geography. That's the way a homeschool mom does things, she learns them so she can teach her kids.
But... the school shouldn't have assigned him that class. He did well, but will the next coach?
I think you will be pleasantly surprised as Jr. gets a little older to find out how well he will do! Primarily because his education was *emphasized* at home. The battles you go through with him are much the same as the ones I had with Myranda. And yet, she always *knew* a lot of stuff. She coulda wrote for Ward Smythe when she was Jr's age. But, it never showed in her schoolin' or her grades. *sigh*
And then, she graduated. Don't know if you recall or not but I posted her first semester's grades from college. For the first time in her life she made all A's. FIRST TIME!!! She said she finally thought it was important to do the work now. *banging head against wall*
LOL... did I ever mention that my first forays into the political arena - aside from voting were school board meetings? I kept hitting them with pushing academics at the elementary students. After about 6 months of living in the home town the newpaper referred to me as "the radical Mrs. [wneighbor]!" BWAAAHAHAHAHA
I can be labeled radical if it's for that!!! :-)
Excellent point.
I heard my world views from my dad too. And I ended up thinking mostly along the same lines as him. If anything, I got a little more conservative than he is, I think primarily because I listened to him and then listened to my peers also. I saw where the wacko peers went in life - and I saw where people with my dad's way of thinking went. No brainer there.
I am finding this a lot! They are the toughest to motivate in class as well. That is the biggest surprise to me about teaching. I was concerned about connecting with the younger set who only wanted to party.
Surprisingly, I find I can interest and motivate almost all the young partiers (even without partying!)
For the most part (not all) the older students who have been on assistance just don't give a whit. They have *so* very many opportunities for assistance but they refuse to take advantage of them.
And this sounds familiar.... like K-12. Perhaps the trouble is that the schools have to accept them, they have to take whoever comes, whether they want to be there or not.
Or we could just blame the teachers.
I think it depends on the passion of the individual for teaching. I know lots of people who teach because they *love* to teach. They would learn anything for the opportunity to teach it to kids they love. It's those who just do it for the job or paycheck who won't *teach.*
I think Corin made a great point about the administrative issues as well. I have seen a lot of great teachers - real teachers - who have been stifled from teaching because of administrative issues.
One interesting point you made too about learning lies in school. Myranda and I had an interesting thing happen when she took public school biology in high school. Myranda was concerned that her textbook taught evolution as fact but never mentioned anything else. (Imagine that - a kid who read the textbook before it was ever assigned) She went to the teacher after class to discuss this with him during the first weeks of school - long before that portion of the textbook was assigned.
That was when she discovered this man (also the football coach) was a Christian. She told him her concerns. He said he agreed with her and explained to her that he can't introduce the topic of creation or that evolution is only theory unless it is broached by a student. He told Myranda that anything she *asked* in class he could elaborate on at length. The stage was set!
When they reached that portion of the lesson, Myranda raised her hand at the first opportunity and asked, "Isn't evolution only a theory and isn't creation another valid opinion?" Teacher had his opening. Then she asked him, "What do you believe coach?" And he had another opening. He also asked Myranda what she believed since she'd asked the question and Myranda was able to go more in depth as to her faith and why she believed it. Pretty cool!
Oh well...
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