Posted on 08/22/2006 7:48:41 PM PDT by SJackson
The problem is that home-schooling parents are unlikely to know much about math. (Except in the A in algebra sense.)
Why can't you just role the doughnut into a ball with your two palms?
And you think the average high school teacher is capable of really working with, accomodating and encouraging a math prodigy? Better than home schooling parents? REALLY?
First of all, high school students are lucky to get into calculus. And the high school structure is almost perfectly designed to limit the better students to the pace of everybody else.
For example, I wanted to learn calculus when I was around 12 years old. In a decent home schooling environment, with even a little encouragement or help, I probably would've been able to at least get going on that path. As it was, in the public school I had to wait another 6 or 7 years -- until I reached university.
Second, I think you deceive yourself in regard to the ranks of home schooling parents with math skills. There are quite a few. I don't even have to look out of our my own house to find a home-schooling mom who's studied calculus at the university level. As for the dad, I took around 40 or 50 credit hours of advanced mathematics, including at graduate level. Advanced calc, ring theory, set theory, advanced probability theory, de, statistics...
But let's say you have a parent with a math whiz kid and NO math skills of his or her own. What's that parent likely to do? In that case, the parent will almost certainly draw upon other resources. And there are plenty of them out there. College courses, tutors, math study groups, coops where a math-knowledgeable parent will help kids in small groups with a lot of one-on-one.
Frankly, from my perspective the home-schooling environment has plenty of flexibility to accomodate prodigies -- if not quite a bit more than the school system. Looks to me like bright HS kids are likely to be quite a bit better off than if they were stuck in a high-school class where they have neither much individual attention nor the opportunity to pursue what they would like to.
The ability of HSers to focus on a topic of interest is one reason why HSers, for their population percentage, tend to dominate things like the National Spelling Bee. Yes, you do have to pull in more outside resources, but the same dynamics can work with math.
In any event, it turns according to the available research that not only do HS kids as a group perform significantly better academically, they're less limited than PS kids by any educational deficiencies on the part of their parents. In other words, the research indicates that if the parent of a PS didn't do well academically, the kid isn't likely to either -- but if the parent of a HS kid didn't do well academically, it really doesn't matter very much.
So your supposition is simply one that might sound good in theory (like the wildly misguided theory that home-schooled kids are "missing out on socialization"), but it doesn't carry with it any real knowledge or experience of the subject.
Sorry to put it that way, but that's my view. :-)
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