Posted on 11/27/2006 7:04:44 AM PST by meandog
Schools With Good Teachers Are Best-Suited to Shape Young Minds
There's nothing like having the right person with the right experience, skills and tools to accomplish a specific task. Certain jobs are best left to the pros, such as, formal education.
There are few homeowners who can tackle every aspect of home repair. A few of us might know carpentry, plumbing and, let’s say, cementing. Others may know about electrical work, tiling and roofing. But hardly anyone can do it all.
Same goes for cars. Not many people have the skills and knowledge to perform all repairs on the family car. Even if they do, they probably don’t own the proper tools. Heck, some people have their hands full just knowing how to drive.
So, why would some parents assume they know enough about every academic subject to home-school their children? You would think that they might leave this -- the shaping of their children’s minds, careers, and futures -- to trained professionals. That is, to those who have worked steadily at their profession for 10, 20, 30 years! Teachers!
Experienced Pros
There’s nothing like having the right person with the right experience, skills and tools to accomplish a specific task. Whether it is window-washing, bricklaying or designing a space station. Certain jobs are best left to the pros. Formal education is one of those jobs.
Of course there are circumstances that might make it necessary for parents to teach their children at home. For example, if the child is severely handicapped and cannot be transported safely to a school, or is bedridden with a serious disease, or lives in such a remote area that attending a public school is near impossible.
Well-Meaning Amateurs
The number of parents who could easily send their children to public school but opt for home-schooling instead is on the increase. Several organizations have popped up on the Web to serve these wannabe teachers. These organizations are even running ads on prime time television. After viewing one advertisement, I searched a home school Web site. This site contains some statements that REALLY irritate me!
“It’s not as difficult as it looks.”
The “it” is meant to be “teaching.” Let’s face it, teaching children is difficult even for experienced professionals. Wannabes have no idea.
“What about socialization? Forget about it!”
Forget about interacting with others? Are they nuts? Socialization is an important component of getting along in life. You cannot teach it. Children should have the opportunity to interact with others their own age. Without allowing their children to mingle, trade ideas and thoughts with others, these parents are creating social misfits.
If this Web site encouraged home-schooled children to join after-school clubs at the local school, or participate in sports or other community activities, then I might feel different. Maine state laws, for example, require local school districts to allow home-schooled students to participate in their athletic programs. For this Web site to declare, “forget about it,” is bad advice.
When I worked for Wal-Mart more than 20 years ago, Sam Walton once told me: “I can teach Wal-Mart associates how to use a computer, calculator, and how to operate like retailers. But I can’t teach them how to be a teammate when they have never been part of any team.”
“Visit our online bookstore.”
Buying a history, science or math book does not mean an adult can automatically instruct others about the book’s content.
Gullible Parents
Another Web site asks for donations and posts newspaper articles pertaining to problems occurring in public schools.
It’s obvious to me that these organizations are in it for the money. They are involved in the education of children mostly in the hope of profiting at the hands of well-meaning but gullible parents.
This includes parents who home-school their children for reasons that may be linked to religious convictions. One Web site that I visited stated that the best way to combat our nation’s “ungodly” public schools was to remove students from them and teach them at home or at a Christian school.
I’m certainly not opposed to religious schools, or to anyone standing up for what they believe in. I admire anyone who has the strength to stand up against the majority. But in this case, pulling children out of a school is not the best way to fight the laws that govern our education system. No battle has ever been won by retreating!
No Training
Don’t most parents have a tough enough job teaching their children social, disciplinary and behavioral skills? They would be wise to help their children and themselves by leaving the responsibility of teaching math, science, art, writing, history, geography and other subjects to those who are knowledgeable, trained and motivated to do the best job possible.
(Dave Arnold, a member of the Illinois Education Association, is head custodian at Brownstown Elementary School in Southern Illinois.)
As I read this two of my three children are sitting in the house doing their schoolwork.
The youngest, a boy-child who was oxygen starved in a very rough birth, was given up on by the specialists in a Maine school. They could not get him to read, write or do any other work, but they did want to drug him. With hard work and LOTS of INDIVIDUAL attention, he has learned to read, write and has developed into a low-end of average student. That is a DAMN sight better than the NEA-trained zombies would have done with him.
Our middle child, the only one of the fairer sex, is a sharp-as-a-tack pupil who requires absolutely NO guidance, and very little assistance. She does her work, her chores, and then goes to her jobs. She is almost 17 years old and is ready to buy her own car and insurance with money earned by her. We are confident that she will do well on the SAT.
Our eldest child is now a young man out on his own. He is a math wiz, who likes to read physics books for fun. He's currently working, supporting himself and trying to figure out what he will go to school for. He is in no hurry, nor should he be. When he goes to school he will be ready, unlike the beer swilling, sorry-assed frat boys and P.C. idiots who populate college campuses today.
My wife, who has done most of the teaching, is a high school graduate. I am a high school dropout with a GED who has had some college since we started the kids in homeschooling. Neither of us has any training in "formal" education, but we have managed to learn as we go. Anyone out there who is thinking about homeschooling should not let these losers discourage you.
In parting I would like to cordially invite the author of this article to gargle the sweat from my nether regions.
"C"
Isn't it obvious?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!
He He. Fired NEA member. That's a good one.
Been there, tried to do that. That's why our eldest is home schooled. The same harridan is still there, screwing up more generations of kids from the comfort of her tenured sinecure, despite at least 5 other parents filing complaints of the same nature, that I personally know of.
I suppose the "A" answer would be that if one knows the momentum of the electrons to the given degree of accuracy, one cannot then know the starting positions, and vice versa. Therefore, the question is unanswerable as it presumes an impossible level of knowledge about the location and motion of the particles.
The "B" answer is 1010. B+ if the answer is also given as 0A.
What's next? Math is much more entertaining than arguing about home schooling :-p
It sounds like you had a similar history education to mine.
According to the amount of time covered for each topic the most important event in American history was the 1848 Seneca Falls convention for women's rights - or at least according to my radical feminist high school American history teacher.
I hated grade school and high school history. At best it was a chronological sequence of unrelated trivia. At worst it was ideological propaganda. It wasn't until a college history class that I had a teacher present history as a sequence of causes and effects.
Well-meaning amateurs versus deviant professionals?
And the classic - "We're the experts, you can't possibly understand what we're doing."
Less than 10% of the working population makes use of any math skill past fractions in a given work day; let's say you have an irregular room that you want to carpet and you know that it measures twice as long across the largest wall as the shortest wall, how do you estimate the amount of carpet needed?
The "Public School Deathwatch" disclaimer is a great idea because they are collapsing. It is just a question of how long it will take for people to finally admit that the emperor has no clothes and how many more children will be harmed by the government school system.
One point that tends to be overlooked is that homeschoolers don't claim any expertise in managing or teaching a class of 25 or so students in a government institution. Teaching your own children and teaching the children of others in a highly regulated 19th century factory/school model are entirely different matters.
For years I had this mental history block between the years 1492 and 1864. Every year things started getting interesting, then we were back to Columbus and the Indians. It took more study on my part in later years to find out those times in history weren't as boring as I thought.
It wasn't until junior year that we got any further in American History. The second half I got a B. The first (1492-Civil War) I had to retake through correspondence because I had failed.
yeah 1010 or 10 in the base 10 system
I sucked at math. I spent a LOT of time looking for a good curriculum that could help me overcome my handicap. I found Saxon. Every night I'd read the next day's lesson and learn it for myself. By year 4, my daughter was frustrated with my slow pace and started learning the lessons on her own. My son followed suit shortly after.
You must ask yourself, why do so many public-school-educated people have difficulty with math? Does it make sense to send our children to the same institution that failed us?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If something isn't working, try a different approach. What's the worst that could happen? The parents could suck as much as the schools?
To sum up: You're saying that she will not be able to teach math. Obviously the public school system can't do that either! Her kids may not be math wizards, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that'll they kick PS butt in history, reading, writing, spelling, vocabulary, Latin and science.
"Does head custodian have the same job description as it did when we were in school?"
It was about 60 years ago that the PC garage started, prior to that they were caled janitors!
We are just be dealing with poor teachers. We are also dealing with gang members and felons among the student body not to mention the number of male teachers who have fathered children or procured abortions for their students!
We've had students shot, beaten to death and even strangled.
I'll fight the laws with my children safe somewhere else, thankyouverymuch. You send YOUR kids.
Looks like we also need "Saxon Grammar" ...
The really smart kids learn from whatever resources are at hand, the lazy learn as much as they contribute and the rest drive the curriculum.
It's really hard to find a book for our kids that isn't part of the whole liberal canon. I'm so sick of Maya Angelou and Gary Soto... but they've been fed such soft pap it's all they can chew anymore. I don't have a single 13 year old who could even comprehend The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
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