Home Schools Run By Well-Meaning Amateurs

NEA ^ | By Dave Arnold

[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.)

[DungeonMaster]

You would think that they might leave this -- the shaping of their children’s minds, careers, and futures -- to trained professionals.

Everyone that sends their kids off to publics screwl is defaulting to this excuse. It is pretty obvious that they want to clear their conscience and they probably even have a similar excuse for putting 8 week old infants in daycare. They have a whole liberal humanist world for emotional fellowship to empower them but we see right through it.

[meandog]

First, it is an easy problem with an easy solution (117-miles). Second, you say that this is a standard high school math question. I am certain that either of my children could answer this question by the 6th or 7th grade. The complexity of the question is low, requiring only a fundamental understanding of the Pythagorean Theorem.

In my high school, our teachers asked the question in binary enumeration too...:

Two electrons go out in opposite directions, each going 11. They both meet another electron and are repelled in opposite 90-degree angles, each traveling 100. How far apart are they:

[HungarianGypsy]

I don't recall any one of my teachers ever knowing very much about the subject they "taught", at all.

During my husband's second year of electronics his teacher was an English teacher. He admitted he had no clue how to teach the class and gave the second year students a library pass so they could have a second lunch.

[ican'tbelieveit]

First, your problem with punishing a student for knowing the answer but not being called on really works well in the real world. Let me run out and practice that in my professional job. Oh boss, I knew that answer all along, but you didn't call on me for advice.

Second, you had to spend all weekend to find an article written by a JANITOR supporting the NEA, didn't you. Here, let me stroke your ego some by posting to your pathetic thread.

Third, you commented that the most arrogant people are homeschoolers. Yet, I find you, in your self-appointed ivory tower to be the most arrogant person I have known along with every other member of the NEA that spews this tripe because they recognize they are becoming irrelevant; as irrelevant as the main stream media. Of course, the MSM spews a very similar tripe: you can't get news from the internet from untrained professionals... etc.

Third, every argument you have made about why people should not homeschool has been debunked, thoroughly, even causing you to have to go back on what you say, repeatedly. Yet you still persist in trying to get people to support you.

Finally, I pinged some of the posters from the last thread you were on where you got so desperate you resorted to a temper tantrum and posting childish pictures, so they could see what a beautiful thread you have posted.

[AnAmericanMother]

When I was between jobs, I looked into substitute teaching at a local elementary school.

I was ridiculously overqualified (advanced degrees, 3 languages, 3 years' teaching experience as an instructor at the university graduate level). But I was unqualified to teach in the City of Atlanta schools because I lack an education degree!

Mind you, the city schools were in deep crisis at that point and the principal of this particular school was a functional illiterate (judging from the letter I received in response to my inquiry.) But we must protect union jobs at all costs!

[cornelis]

My point is that there's no guarantee in the school systems, either.

It quite likely that some of the plagues that haunt public school is present in American society at large. It shouldn't surprise us that homeschooling is beset with imperfection and is not a cure-all. The idea of being able to perfect education is a myth and a serious misunderstanding of human nature.

[Prov3456]

Parents can teach the elementary school skills of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and basic math.

In many parts of the country, home schoolers have banded together to form "Home School Associations" where adults teach their personal "specialty" as a class. (Examples: foreign languages; accountants teach higher-level math classes such as Calculus; Music; Art; sports associations, etc. in groups of high-school aged students from the association.)

[Marie]

I HAVE wondered why parents who homeschool don't automatically band together and specialize, each focusing on a different subject. It would seem that charter schools would naturally flow out of such an arrangement. I'm pretty sure it happens, but it seems like it would be a natural outcome.

We do. A few years ago another HS mom and I joined together to divide the subjects. She taught math and science and I taught history, reading and writing. It's just tough to find others who are compatible, willing and who live close enough to be practical.

[WOSG]

"We have the Dinosaur Media deathwatch disclaimer. Maybe we need a Public School Deathwatch disclaimer."

Great idea.

[A_perfect_lady]

Not to mention that the whole system is constantly reinforcing liberal dogma. Even the state tests are laden with little bombs. Stories where you must find the moral (moral is always: people who don't share what they earned are bad, bad people)... essays on segregation and how bad racism in America was and is... environmental activism masquerading as reading comprehension... My ESL 4 students are required to do a research paper on How FDR's New Deal Saved America. No, I'm serious. And the state of California wants that paper in their ESL folders that go with them all through the program, so they want to make ABSOLUTELY SURE that EVERY ESL student has obediently recited that FDR's New Deal Saved America. I could go on.

[LexBaird]

So, how are the kids you homeschool going to do on the following standard high school math question: Two automobiles start out in opposite directions. Each go 40 miles; make 90-degree left turns and go 30 miles. How far apart are they?

You assume that teachers are the only people capable of disclosing the Pythagorean theorem? To determine the hypotenuse of a right triangle, use A²+B²=C².

You also seem assume that if a parent DIDN'T know that theorem, that they wouldn't know how to do a 5 second search on the Net to get the answer.

[Explorer89]

Whether it is window-washing, bricklaying or designing a space station.

Betcha the homeschoolers don't use sentence fragments.

[meandog]

I teach English and ESL in an inner city middle school in Los Angeles. My students are often quite sweet, but they are as wild as feral mink. I remember this one boy who had just come from Belarus and he was an intelligent, well-mannered, witty 12 year old. He would sit in his chair and look around in astonishment at the cursing, dirty little inner city hoodlums with tagging all over their backpacks. Poor kid. He was obviously thinking "This is America?"

Know what you mean...I have a friend who teaches elementary ed here in Va. A lot of her kids are children of migrant Hispanics who come to harvest the crops. They are in school usually from September to the first of November, then head south (Mexico?). They return in the spring for planting. The state mandates a Standards of Learning requirement (thanks to former Gov. George Allen) and the school must pass it to remain accredited; but it makes no allowance for ESL children who attend school just 6 mos. out of the year.

[meandog]

Finally, I pinged some of the posters from the last thread you were on where you got so desperate you resorted to a temper tantrum and posting childish pictures, so they could see what a beautiful thread you have posted.

Well, good for you, you little tattletale...now, go sit in the corner with the rest of your childish ilk!

[LexBaird]

Need I say mroe?

I say you should clam down.

[WOSG]

I see that you know geometry but not logic. the previous poster was saying they were *more* knowledgable than a public HS teacher, not less. If they arent qualified, neither is the public school.

Moreover, teacher knowledge level is not the only determinant. How is it that my 8 year old son knows more than I about dinosaurs? he didnt learn from any equally ignorant public school teacher.

[ican'tbelieveit]

Ah, does sending children to the corner make the big old NEA professional's ego feel better?

[BlackElk]

That is true only because most love slaves (duespayers) of the National Edjamakashun Association are FAR WORSE than mere Democrats. Also, since when is a thoroughly socialist institution like gummint misedjamakashun and the drones who occupy the front of the classroom doing a half vast job of attempting to communicate what they do not themselves know, some sort of object of conservative support.

Gummint skewels are leftist brain laundries for the children of many parents who do not know better.

That some teachers are patriots, veterans, churchgoers, and even conservatives does NOT save gummint skewels from their well-deserved reputation as "intellectual" cesspools, fountains of ideological and financial corruption, hideously mismanaged and ludicrously expensive with so verrrrry little other than "elegant decline" to show for all the trillions they have wasted, federal, state and local. Some gummint skeweled kids get their condom supplies from the gummint skewel as early as FIFTH GRADE!!!! New Haven, CT among others). Others are taken in secret to the nearest abortion mill by skewel personnel lest mom and dad know what's going on in their daughter's life. Religion is banned by SCOTUS edict based on no reasonable reading of the Constitution. Of course, if religion were not banned, the skewels would probably be advocating human sacrifice.

The teachers know so little of their subject matter because they were too busy spending time in edjamakashun courses to see that the teachers understand their role in leftist propaganda.

Why would anyone in his/her right mind think that gummint skewels are worthy of tax support. They are not.

My Catholic priest thinks that you should be a Catholic too but we do not give him tax money or tax every other church to discourage your attendance, making my Church the easiest default position. I would not want my Church so favored. I am a conservative. If we cannot convince you without financial incentives, we don't deserve you.

You suggest that you are a conservative by posting here and yet you want to force me and others to support gummint skewels which are the parochial schools of the radical left, secular humanism, agnosticism, atheism, leftism, socialism, peacecreepism, and just about every other evil in our society.

If I don't want to support my pastor, I can change parishes or religions or even become an atheist or agnostic (none of these at all likely in my lifetime or God's lifetime). If I do not want to pay the salaries of gummint skewel indoctrinators who take it as a profession to cram falsehoods that I hate down the throats of their students, what do I do to be free of this particular socialist imposition?????

[L,TOWM]

The funny thing is, my 10 year son can do that problem now. The pythagorian theorem fascinated him from the time he first saw it a year and half ago. He is now discovering the joys of the Law of Invesre Squares (laughing).

And he reads HS level literature.

My daughter, soon to be 13, will have to be throttled back pretty soon for evrything but math. She is already doing High School level literature, science, and social sciences. I expect the math to come around - she is now seeing a tutor once a week. She will have to throttled back because our community college won't let her take classes there until she is 16.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

As opposed to the public schools that turn out kids with an average 4th grade reading level?

My kids started school at a 4th grade reading level.