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.)
Dear JenB,
"So by self-selecting, you could make the case that the homeschoolers and the public schoolers who take the SATs are similar groups - college-bound teens in the last year or three of their education.
"In other words, comparing SAT scores should acceptable as a metric for homeschool achievement."
Even more so, since the public schools actually get to jettison the 25% - 30% of kids that they fail utterly and entirely, with absolutely downside statistically. Remember, about 25% - 30% of public schoolers drop out without graduating. So, if a high school tells you that 70% of their graduates are going on to college, or that 70% are taking the SAT, what that means is that roughly 50% of the kids who started there as freshmen are college-bound or taking the SAT. In a district where 50% of seniors take the SAT, that's really only around 35% of their ultimate student population.
And, a significant portion of the kids who are graduating from high school were homeschooled through the elementary school years. I'm sure that they are pretty much exclusively at the top of their classes.
The Catholic high school that is recruiting my older son right now has a population of homeschoolers that's about 3% of the total school population. We've been told that these kids all graduate near the tops of their classes. Last year's valedictorian was a homeschooler.
Homeschoolers who re-enter schools at the high school level are helping to prop up the overall test scores of high schools.
Thus, when we examine things like SAT scores of public schools, we're typically talking only about the top 35% - 40% of these students, and a significant percentage of those folks were homeschooled for a large part of their education.
sitetest
I may have survived a public school education, but it was far from a successful experiment. I could have accomplished much more and been a much more productive member of society much earlier in my adult life had I not been exposed to the public school mess.
Then, I cannot begin to discuss the pain and misery I inflicted on my parents because I was rebelling to be accepted by my cool school "friends." Guess how many are still in my life: zero, zip, nada. But, the scars of those years are still there for everyone involved.
Well, good for you.
The lesson in this is that I don't need to needlessly put my children through hell just because I went through hell and was "better" for it.
I wasn't better for it.
Not in my state. To get into a community college, all that's required is placement tests for English and Math. All of my students who have entered the local CC have scored into the honors English classes, and most are placed into Algebra (not pre). They all take the ACT test, but it's not mandatory.
Please note: These students came to me, usually in the 10th grade, most of them scoring at the 7th grade or lower on their English and Math placement test that I give them. Yes, they came from public schools. Yes, they were all smart, but they were never made to memorize multiplication, diagram a sentence, or use their brain.
They thought the way to answer the questions at the end of each section of the chapter was to 1. look at the question 2. look thru the text for words that looked the same 3. write down the words immediately following the words they had seen in the question. They didn't think it was necessary to read the materiel! They didn't know how to THINK! It takes time and lots of one-on-one attention to help someone learn to think.
"I often wonder what constitutes "reading at grade level"."
That is a very good question. When I discovered that teaching children to read using a good phonics curriculum is a relatively trivial exercise and my children began reading everything, I began to wonder that myself. In other words, the boys were far ahead of what passes "grade level" in the ever-so-wonderful suburban district that we live in, and the question that I had for myself was whether this was a real achievement or just the intellectual equivalent of a normal child winning the 100 yd dash at the Special Olympics. So...I went to the local homeschool store and got used copies of the first edition (1836) of McGuffey's Readers (Mott Media reprint) and discovered that what passes for grade level today was far surpassed by those poor children in the 1830s and beyond who lacked central heat and air, indoor plumbing, electric lights, adequate medical care, certified teachers trained in the latest "learning strategies", expensive school buildings, and, most tragically of all, world-class school sports facilities (you say you don't have $100 million in district sports facilities? How can you expect little Rugbert to learn?).
Gee.... Some of the absolutely WORST teachers I've ever had were tenured, long time "teachers."
One absolutely ruined math for me my frshman year in highschool. In his class, we had a weekly quiz every Friday. Ten questions. 4 of 10 correct was an A. 3 or 10 correct was a B. 2 of 10 was a C. 1 or none correct was a D. He gave no "F"s. I learned nothing whatsoever.
On the other hand, some of the best teachers I've ever had were NOT "trained professionals," at least not as teachers. They were excellent in their fields.
There are some teachers who are in the profession because it's their avocation: They're passionate about the subjects they teach, and they love teaching it. These are the best teachers you can ever have. I've been lucky enough to have some teachers like this over the years.
But far too many teachers are in the business because they figure that they get summers off, and the fact that they failed in more rigorous educational pursuits. "Those who can't do, teach" perfectly defines them. And I've had far too many of the later.
Mark
Well, good for you.
See my 587...I, too, applaud home schooling.
Go to www.nheri.org to see if there is an answer to the college education question (I think the answer is that most do not have college degrees - like the rest of the population). The answer to the first SAT question is "Yes". But you should know that the answer to the second SAT question is "No" - the SAT isn't mandatory for anybody. Only fairly selective schools require it, and many of those prefer the ACT.
It already exists. www.sepschool.org
Wonderful site! Thank you!
Dear achilles2000,
"When I discovered that teaching children to read using a good phonics curriculum is a relatively trivial exercise and my children began reading everything, I began to wonder that myself."
Part of what turned us off from school is that our older son was in Kindergarten, an allegedly good Catholic school, and the teachers were actually discouraging him from figuring out the reading thing. He was getting too far ahead, and they were unhappy about that.
He sorta half-picked up reading in spite of it all during Kindergarten. We encouraged him at home, but because of the dual-authority thing, "But the teacher doesn't want me..." it was a struggle.
We began homeschooling him the following fall, for 1st grade. Within a week or two, it all clicked in his head and he went from sorta reading not too bad for a first grade to being a real, heavy-duty reader. I'd had a habit of reading to him most every night since he was little. We read "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" together. We'd started "The Chronicles of Narnia" at the end of the summer, and we were a little ways in when the school year started.
Once he put it all together, in the first few weeks of 1st grade, he decided that I wasn't reading enough of the "Chronicles" to him every night, and he started reading it on his own. He was done the entire series of books by Christmas.
Humans are built to learn this stuff.
Often, schools do little but interfere, inhibit, and prevent.
Students often succeed in spite of their schools. Especially public schools staffed by NEA shills.
sitetest
I would extend your experience with reading to morals, conservatism, religion.
If you only have a rushed morning shoving your munchkin out the door for school, and then are rushing around after school to extracurricular activies, putting dinner on the table, and dealing with the 4 hours of homework that should never have been sent home in the first place (why can't it get done in the 8 hours you have my kid), you are limited in reinforcing your values in your child.
But, the almighty educators at that school get how many hours a day to influence your child, "mold their minds." On top of that, if your child is sitting in a class room of 30 kids, and stands up for his/her belief in opposition to the other 29 kids... Wow.
Dear ican'tbelieveit,
"I would extend your experience with reading to morals, conservatism, religion."
Oh! How I agree with you!
That will be an important topic for discussion in deciding whether or not the guys go to high school or stay homeschooled through high school.
sitetest
My pleasure.
Head custodians at these pubic schools are like the Nurse Rached's of the asylums.
They run the places and often make more money than the teachers.
Great story - your children are lucky. As for the "NEA shills", as you put it, most teachers today don't shill - they don't understand enough to do it. They actually believe the rubbish that has been pumped into their heads by the NEA and schools of ed. The BU Ed School Dean sums it up nicely:
"Dean Edwin J. Delattre of Boston University School of Education - one of the harshest critics of teacher training - says there are no more than 50 good teacher training institutions among the 1,300 in the country. Of the others, he says: "They admit and graduate students who have low levels of intellectual accomplishment. They are well-intentioned, decent, nice people who by and large don't know what they're doing.""
This is why it is so difficult to reach people working in the public schools with any sort of reasoned argument. There are, of course, geniuses and near geniuses working in the schools, but mostly, and especially among the newer teachers, you are dealing with intellectual cripples. And the administrators are worse - they have lower GRE scores than elementary school teachers. A $600 billion/year institution run by its worst and dumbest, not its best and brightest.
For an interesting article, see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/9905.innerst.method.html
This guy is so full of scat.Leave it to the trained professionals? Right.Id rather teach my children to the best of my ability than trust the most precious things in my life to some left wing dirtbag who claims they can teach.
I understand your frustration with seeing all the money schools spend on the trappings and comforts while failing to address real academic achievement.
Are you alright?
Seriously.
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