Posted on 08/24/2014 9:58:27 AM PDT by TexasBarak
Everyone, public school parents, private school parents, home educators, ought to read articles by John Taylor Gatto. (a public school teacher, retired now)
Look him up.
my DD (not the one homeschooled) is in a performing arts magnet program and there is nothing leftist about Shakespeare and Greek theater :-)
It also depends on the type of learner the kid is, and the style of teaching in the courses. A kid who is a visual learner, with poor listening skills will do very poorly in an on- line course that includes taped lectures. They just won’t be able to pay attention.
Those kids might do better with a type of course that is just reading and comprehending , answering questions following each day’s assignment.
You have to know the learning style of the student and make sure the course is a good fit.
Mine did not and at age 16 we have had to pump it up
He is joining Venture Scouts this year, starting a part time “job” working as an SPCA volunteer and taking martial arts classes
I guess it depends on the kid, but mine has special needs and that means dysfunctional social skills
and that is a big reason why he is being homeschooled
but as we have seen with some sad highly publicized cases like Adam Lanza, you cannot keep them at home in a cocoon living their lives online
I didn't say let the kid do anything she wants everywhere ever minute. The kid has already proven she wants the best education she can get, and she has demonstrated she knows how to figure that out.
Take your self-righteous condescension elsewhere.
Rooster (or anyone familiar with Khan), how is the history? Is it typical revisionist, fabrication or ignore facts like history is taught today?
No, it isn't home schooling. It is a proprietary Charter school to which tax funds are diverted based on enrollment.
I think that the state of Missouri and/or the University of Missouri had online high school courses. They still may but the few educational programs that Jay Nixon cut all seem to diminish the power of the teachers unions or reduce the physical presence of students in the government schools.
Khan is good for individual subjects and lessons and it is free but doesn’t provide a curriculum and some of us need more structured guidance to meet standards required to earn credits
For math up to high school I like IXL math (subscription but worth it) and also Discovery Education Streaming (subscription but worth it) for all subjects, especially social studies, science and language arts
Home School Buyers Co-Op (free) offers discounted subscriptions to many resources
Oh because I disagree with you, I am full of self righteous condescension. LOL!!
You sure are over-sensitive. I’m not condescending, I’m correct. That attitude is rampant in our government schooled mentality. Parents are dumb, kids know more than their parents. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
You are so right about that. :)
This is not an ordinary kid. She knows what she wants. Why discourage that? Most kids that age have no idea what they want.
And she's not going to a government school, by her own choice. She decided that, not her parents. They let her make her choice. I suppose because she decided it her parents should put their foot down and send her to a government school?
I’m replying to one sentence that you wrote and I presume, believe. You persist in putting words in my mouth (so to speak) and bringing up other things, completely ignoring what I am writing. Ok, whatever. I’m not playing your game.
Yes, but —— sorry ——— we did not like connections at all. Not for the classes but the structure.
I think it’s important to tell your daughter that there are lots of online schools, and you guys are trying this one. They are all a little different. This way, if the structure of connections doesn’t suit you guys, it won’t turn her off of other online schooling for the next year. Just tell her, hey, we are (as a family) new at this, so this sounds great, let’s try this school, but we can remember that there are others too.
Here is what we liked about connections: the teachers and his advisor were great people. It is free.
Here is what we didn’t like:
First and foremost, they communicate only by their own system. SUCKAGE!!!!! To us it was like smoke signals. We operate on tablets. Their web mail system doesn’t work on tablets. So that made it extremely hard for us. He couldn’t always reach people to help when he needed it.
Second they have a structure that is very negative - he would log on and the first thing he saw was the number of incomplete assignments. We were told there wasn’t much “busywork” but for him it piled up and up. He was a competitive athlete without much time for school, so this was a real bummer start of his day. You have 17 assignments undone. You have 24 assignments undone. During his travel season he fell behind and seeing all the assignments undone each day made him not want to even log on.
I am a longtime homeschooler and I felt the books used for his classes were the boring, uninspired texts you find in public schools.
We left and were not at all impressed. But the people who recommended the school to us had enjoyed it. And their son had graduated from connections.
Anyway, hope you love it. And if you don’t, there are other great online schools, and even if they cost money, it will be MUCH cheaper than parochial or private schools near you.
And yes, she can go at her own pace, so she will jump ahead of her peers like nothing else. She also will be able to spend a lot of time on what she loves most to do among her other pursuits (sports, art, etc.). Happy homeschooling!
My daughter was an athlete also and I asked her what she would have thought about on-learning. She said that it would have been a disaster because she went through her classes in a daze, so tired that she could barely function. She said that the teachers were the only thing that prevented her from putting her head down on the desk and going to sleep.
They don’t do that to swimmers anymore, they don’t even have two a day work-outs.
My son has been part of the K12 community since January of 2013, and he loves it. He’s doing MUCH better in school, with none of the crap that goes on in high school. This year he will be a junior and is actually looking FORWARD to some of his classes. The best thing about it is they send you all the course material for FREE, and even send you a pre-paid UPS label to ship them back at the end of the semester. What I like about it is: no new school clothes, backpacks, supplies, ASB cards, gym suits, stupid assemblies that waste everyone’s time, etc. He attends daily ‘class connects’ on line where you can see what the teacher is doing on the blackboard just as if you were sitting in class. He can attend ANYWHERE, which means we can go on vacation in the middle of the school year and he doesn’t have to make up a bunch of stuff when we get back. I plan to buy him a laptop soon so he doesn’t have to use his brothers computer, and can be truly mobile. If she’s motivated to do this, she’ll probably do just great!
I only took the mathematics courses so I can’t answer.
I would look to Khan as a supplementary source when taking mathematics courses (his specialty).
Yep. Sounds like you and I had the exact same experience with Connections.
We also had issues with live lessons. Connections didn’t work, confusion to which classroom to click on to enter, etc.
Scanning their schoolwork, making it into a PDF file and shooting it into their dropbox -only to read a webmail that they didn’t receive it or the file was too big....
Arrgh!
Oh yeah, forgot about the live lessons! More SUCKAGE!
Nothing is ever really free.
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