I must say that there is a lot of the waldrof school that I love. I love the things that the children play with...But I'm sure I've mentioned my love of play silks and wadorf dolls before. Hell I love the waldorf dolls so much I learned how to make them. I'm intrigued by their learning physolophy...but I also know that that learning style would be a HUGE disaster for my children. But we do hugely incorporate their toys into our daily life.
In my mind, it doesn't matter how good the school is if the parents don't value learning and aren't involved in the child's education. I went to a small, rural school system that gave me a decent, basic education--although I will say that the majority of what I learned that was important was socialization. There is nothing that I learned in school, book-wise, that I couldn't have learned at home--and on my own, because I once had some kind of vacuum-like brain which was really kind of ridiculous. (Unfortunately, it seems to have taken leave during law school, but what can you do?)
What I learned at school was socialization, and I can tell you that I needed it--although other kids may not need this kind. Being at school taught me that I had to take turns, shouldn't make people feel stupid, should keep my mouth shut at least part of the day, that being right is not always enough, and the difference between ruling and leading. In other words, peer pressure helped make me bearable and MUCH more diplomatic. This is certainly a YMMV scenario, though. Could I have learned these things at home? Maybe--but being a loud-mouthed, brainy, argumentative child with dictatorial tendencies was not seen as a negative by most of my family (most of the time).
There are many venues for socializing your child. Little league sports, special interest clubs, 4-H, summer camps, etc. I was going to say boy scouts, but I don't like their politics. A child doesn't have to be socialized with others everyday.
I went to a Montessori school from 2 1/2 til 7, and had a ball. Then I went to a state school and was hopelessly bored for a year til my parents sent me to a private school with a more difficult curriculum.
I was also home-schooled for two terms when I was ten, before I started secondary school.
I think you should definitely teach your kid to read as early as possible, because it's really not difficult to pick up if exposed to it constantly, pretty much from day one, and it's a huge advantage. I'm visiting my folks at the moment and I've just asked my mother about this, and she's pretty sure I was reading simple things independently from about 1 1/2.
Most of the Montessori system is really just common sense, from what I remember of it. Use objects (e.g. beads) to learn to count, and then use them as counters in order to do sums. Learn to read by sounding out the words, a la Sesame Street. Tie your laces. Draw a lot. Build stuff with Lego. Learn music by learning to sing.
If you're stuck for a Montessori school in your area, I don't think you'll have trouble doing it yourself, if you've got time.
On the other hand, I'd be more reluctant to recommend home-schooling for older kids, purely because I found it could get quite lonely. I also think there's something to be said for being in a work environment with your peers.
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To prove my love for you, I had these flowers killed. Put them in water and it will prolong their slow, agonizing death.
Personally, I believe that home schooling requires a lot of time and commitment that I personally can not give. Mister Stopper and I decided to live in a small town with nice public schools. We are mostly satisfied with the quality of the education they are receiving, although we do not understand the "new math" that the kids are being taught. We are fortunate to have a positive public school experience here. Our kids are doing very well.
For homeschoolers, I applaud your dedication. There are a lot of tools out there for you. I have heard of a virtual school: secularhomeschool.net This program has all the materials for homeschooling without religion.
ETA: One of my chat friends is using a virtual charter school: http://k12.com/ Friend says "It's not available everywhere. Well, you can get the curriculum regardless (and it looks quite good from what I can see), but if your state doesn't have a virtual school you have to pay for it."
Last edited by 256 colors; 02-15-2008 at 12:50 AM.
See what I mean...how the hell could I have started this discussion 2 years ago when in my head it was just like a few months back? Time fucking flies.
Kiddo is 3.5. We just ordered him some mega huge super special Transformer because we told him we would when he visually recognized the entire alphabet. He does now. He will tell you that day and night is caused by the Earth's rotation. He can identify several dinosaurs and tell you if they were plant or meat eaters. He knows what a sinkhole is. He knows what an aglet is. He knows his address. He is the youngest in the Tae Kwan Do class and has done everything asked of him there for his age group, and made friends (IOW social skills seem on track).
Because of his January birthday, he will be almost 6 when he is allowed to start Kindergarten here. I really, really don't think they will have much to teach him by that time. I have already predicted to hubby that Kiddo will be reading within a year, as he asks me to point to the words as I am reading them so he can follow along.
Home education is still at the front of my mind and I am reading everything I can about it. If anyone has any updated thoughts or anything, I'd love to hear them
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"It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened."
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Next time someone asks you to do something they think is difficult, but you know is easy for you, Adam, tell them your reward must be a Bumblebee the size of a small dog.
Kiddo will probably be a lawyer, he comes up with ironclad contracts
My only updated thought is that public-school Kindergarten, at least at my daughter's school, is waaaay more advanced than I would have dreamed of giving it credit for. When I was in school back in the mid-Permian era, I was bored silly by Kindergarten, because I already knew all the crap they were struggling to teach us. I don't think I learned a damned thing until second grade or so. Nowadays they cover at least what used to be covered through all of first grade, all in K.
Oh and as for important but little-known facts,
Ben-Gay is not a suitable lubricant. Don't let the name fool you.
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"Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That's a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction." - Eleanor of Aquitaine
My only updated thought is that public-school Kindergarten, at least at my daughter's school, is waaaay more advanced than I would have dreamed of giving it credit for.
What kinds of things is she working on? And how is she doing?
Schools aren't really so much about just sitting at desks any more, though I guess it depends on the school. And there is nothing preventing people whose kids are at school during the day from continuing educating them in the evening, just informally. Kids are absolute learning machines.
Hi Miisa thanks for the response. I have strong feelings about this, and have researched it for 2.5 years, but want to discuss it so moved your post here.
I am not sure where you are, but most areas in the US don't even offer field trips, art, or music anymore due to budget cuts. Kids are carefully segregated by age, not ability, and sit in overcrowded classrooms, at a desk, in front of an underpaid teacher for 6 hours a day.
Attendance laws have gone Medieval, so taking a family trip when it's convenient for working parents, rather than the school schedule, can get you in court for truancy- regardless of the child's performance.
Not sure what, if any, important changes have been made to NCLB, but as it was schools were teaching to the tests, meaning those with high ability are being left behind.
No, I'd rather travel, meet people, make, cook and build things, and follow and challenge my child's pace and interests, than have him stuck following some other kid's pace and nobody's interests.
I'm glad you moved it, cuz I was done talking about it in that thread but I still had more to say. I have a specific example of my childhood neighbors (the homeschool family I mentioned in the other thread) because to this day it sticks in my head as a very effective lesson. It has to do with using math fractions to halve recipes (which is pretty elementary, but I'm talking about seven- and nine-year-olds).
In their home, being taught by their parents, they did their paper lesson in fractions (yes they had paper lessons, not unlike the lesson plans you can download or purchase today), and then immediately went to the practical application thereof. They went and baked a bunch of cookies, but they intentionally halved the recipe so that it would apply to their math lesson.
When I was in elementary school, we had a similar lesson, but it just played out differently in the school environment. We had the math lesson in the classroom, and for a homework assignment we had to choose a recipe and re-write it on poster boards as the original, the half, and the double. (Is this a good time to mention that this is in the US where we use 1/2 cup and 1/4 cup, as opposed to liters and centiliters, etc.?) Then bring it in the next day and share it. We didn't even make the food! WTF.
Maybe it comes down to the type of learner I am. I am very much a learn-by-doing person, and always have been. In math, it was like, fuck the lecture let's get to the homework. It's the same for me at work and with programming. I don't learn in the abstract, I need to get my hands dirty.
So in my case, nearly all the time I spent at school was a waste of my time. Which is like six hours a day. Fortunately for me, my parents also were very engaged in my learning and they continued to educate me outside of the classroom, but not every school-taught child has that. Imagine if I could have spent and extra six hours a day not being bored and fidgety and instead having an actual real education. That's what I saw in my neighbors and I envied it.
As far as "what do bible puppet shows teach us?" well, it's fucking literature. It doesn't have to be the Bible, it can be Shakespeare or classical Greek. The point is these children, aged seven and nine, were designing costumes, sets, learning the stories, acting the roles. They weren't just sitting and reading a chapter for homework and answering a bunch of trivial comprehension questions the next day. They were seriously engaged in the literature.
I don't know. I'm rambling. I just really hate the way education has been institutionalized.
In 4th grade we did a unit study on Japan. We cooked food, made kimonos, learned a scaled down, simplified version of tea ceremonies, etc. In 5th grade we wrote and recorded a radio play, and wrote and staged a marionette show (though we didn't make the marionettes). Anyway, seems to me some elementary schools , at least the ones I went to, were more progressive 25-30 years than they are now. My niece has never reported anything hands on or even remotely interesting.
All the cool stuff, for me, ended in middle school though. Once I hit 6th grade and we went to lectures and textbooks only, I skated on raw intelligence and learned what I wanted to outside of school. I was a hell of a library researcher back then, and could find anything in the card catalog.
I just really hate the way education has been institutionalized.
This is the sticking point for me. My kid is special to me, nobody can care about him or know more about him than we can, and no institution can adapt to him as an individual. In a classroom he is 1 of 30, and will be taught the exact same things, in the exact same way as all of them, whether that method or those subjects are what he needs to thrive and grow or not...because that's what schools do.
I've thought about this a lot, both as an aspiring professor and someone who toyed very briefly with the thought of becoming a K-12 teacher. The conclusion I've regrettably come to is that John Holt was right, and nothing will change in the public school system because we've got the system society wants.
The problems with a conventional public school education are enormous.
First off, the authoritarianism of current public schools is appalling. Systems of surveillance, police officers (who are either armed or in possession of "less lethal" methods of crowd control like pepperspray and tasers), and draconian "zero-tolerance" policies do end up teaching children something: how to obey. And if they don't learn how to obey to the satisfaction of the pigs, well, bad things can happen....
For those unlucky enough to be living in poor communities, especially in cities, the schools are operated like prisons. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was notorious for this shit when he ran the public schools in Chicago, which means that it is not likely to improve in the immediate future.
I feel like taking a shower after going through all those links again.
Academically, schools are bound up by dozens of needless, stupid regulations from their state legislature and the federal level which de-professionalize teaching and make learning difficult. NCLB is a case in a point, but many states have similar regulations all to make schools "accountable". A good friend of mine is a teacher at an inner-city school in Miami where they even send bureaucrats into her classroom to confirm that she's teaching 'correctly'. She's not ever been sanctioned, she's not a poor teacher (in fact, she's being entrusted with not only the AP European History classes but also Honors English), but they do it anyway just because the city and state demand it. And on those days absolutely no education gets done, because there is no point in common between what a bureaucrat thinks education is and what education really is.
As my friend is an expert in history, not literature, this will be her first time teaching these honors classes. In prepping for the class, she's run into a little bit of a problem: the city schools can tell her how to teach down to the minute, but nobody knows what she is allowed to assign in her class. Neither she nor I have been able to figure this out.
One problem with setting arbitrary standards of "progress" for the purpose of standardized testing is that it prevents remediation. All over the country, students who fail math courses are shunted back into the same math courses they just failed. No attempt at remediation is made or even considered. May I invoke the proverbial definition of insanity here? At the college level, we're having to put the students who never got remediation through it, which is one reason why a bachelor's degree is becoming the new high school diploma (and consequently a master's degree is the new bachelor's).
There's also the problem of how much gets taught in the U.S. public school that is either false or useless. Most U.S. history classes, even world history classes, are useless because they're so anemic. Anything potentially "controversial" is carefully scrubbed from the textbooks and something suitably warm, dry, and boring is put in its place. There are still classes that teach old myths as fact (e.g. that George Washington was offered the position of a monarch and turned it down) and major historical issues are either misrepresented or omitted (James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me is a very good critique of this).
Back when I was in high school, I faced the same thing. You might think that being in an AP U.S. History class would mean that I'd be learning real history instead of triumphalist garbage, but you'd be wrong. Fortunately, especially when it came to the Civil Rights Movement, my teacher was a 60 year-old Black woman who had marched in the South during the fifties and sixties, and so we got real history from her own mouth and didn't need to get a truncated and whitewashed account from our history books.
Political pressures were brought to bear in another way in that class. The "don't ask, don't tell" policy was still a controversial issue, especially in San Diego which was half a military town between the Navy and the USMC base at Camp Pendleton. I wanted to do my major paper for the class on the post-Stonewall gay rights movement. My teacher knew, however, that if word got out that she'd be blasted by the local right-wing blowhards for indoctrinating students in the "gay lifestyle". Yes, it would have been my own choice for a paper topic, but facts don't stop these people. So she encouraged me to write a different paper topic, which I did, and eventually wrote the one I first thought of for an undergraduate class.
She was right to worry. Even as recently as this year, a student was told that she wouldn't be allowed to deliver a report on Harvey Milk. According to school officials, it would be tantamount to teaching "sex ed" and would require parental permission slips from the fellow students. Seriously.
My last objection to any form of traditional schooling, public or private, is the way in which it tends to suppress curiosity. I'm sure all of us have known our share of bright children who entered school and suddenly turned apathetic (or been them). It's no accident. A couple years ago, I had a very long break and didn't need to be in class for over two and a half hours. Sometimes I'd go to the library, sometimes I'd just sit outside, and sometimes I would go to the Birch Aquarium on the UCSD campus. One day at the aquarium, I saw a teacher leading her elementary school students on a field trip. There was absolutely nothing to her lesson plan except to tick off boxes once they saw an animal on their list. Unfortunately, she was too ignorant to even do that and couldn't identify a "sea nettle" (ctenophore) because it wasn't identified as such on any of the aquarium displays. But the worst part came later, when one of her students was looking at a display on cladistics. He pressed one button, and the whole display lit up (to demonstrate a plesiomorphy, an ancestral characteristic shared by all the taxa on the display). The teacher's response? "Don't press all the buttons at once!"
The student hadn't, and he said so, and I stuck up for him. I gave a brief impromptu discussion of cladistics to tell him and the teacher exactly why the whole panel had lit up. But even if he had pressed all the buttons at once, what business was that of the teacher's? That's hardly the most critical issue here. The point of these displays is to encourage young people to have a hands-on experience of the science and to think about the science while they're doing it. If they want to press all the buttons on a board, LET THEM. The lesson shouldn't be about conforming to this teacher's arbitrary, unstated standards for "proper behavior" in an aquarium.
I think that if I hadn't been there, the lesson that student would have taken home is that being curious is wrong and puts you on the teacher's bad side.
I thought of something at lunch! Why do I always think of something at lunch?
Okay, the thing is, I get why there is public school, and I get why the government requires that children go to school. Education is necessary, and it should be free, and children should be required to have it and not go work in the mines all day. This all makes perfect sense to me as a defense of public schools. I think public schools are just great (except for the ways in which they all suck, as Null pointed out) in a situation where that's the only choice a kid has. Working parents, uninvolved parents, whatever.
What really sticks in my craw is when the state goes around and says, "No, you can't homeschool your kid. Your kid can't sail around the world for a year (or backpack across Europe or whatever the fuck) because he is required to attend school." As though they think their option is somehow better than any alternative education they could get outside of the school. When really, it should be a last resort.
In my research, I recently read (or heard? seems mebbe I saw it on TV) how our educational system has not fundamentally changed since the days of the industrial revolution, so, in effect, we are teaching our kids to be good factory workers, and not great thinkers and innovators.
That gave me an "aha" moment, as it pretty succinctly sums up all my thoughts and feelings about the public school environment.
"This exhibit opposes any prophetic pedagogy which knows everything before it happens, which teaches children that every day is the same, that there are no surprises, and teaches adults that all they have to do is repeat that which they were not able to learn."
-- Loris Malaguzzi, one of the founders of the Reggio system, re The Hundred Languages of Children exhibit put on by the infant-toddler centers and pre-schools of Reggio Emilia
Thanks for copying this here, I didn't even know about this thread.
Our schools are not too dissimilar here; budget restraints, disinterested parents, underpaid teachers, no separation into levels, combined with late starts (age 7, formally) and no real possibility of alternatives (such as private schools or homeschooling), yet Finnish kids do amazingly well in international tests.
This old article tries to explain why. Highly-regarded and highly educated (even though low-paid) teachers, student participation, stuff like that. I have frequently heard stuff like "homogenous culture" thrown as a reason by non-Finns, but that is not as extreme as assumed, certainly not to the cities.
I think basically educated, knowledge-driven parents will foster similar kids, regardless of the level of "formality" of their education. I see the schools as a great place for my kids to learn the basics, practise over and over what they need to know (and I basically don't have the patience to do with such repetition), socialize with other kids, learn from being in a group, have someone with a trained eye monitor their progress to make sure they are at least on an average level in all subjects, and otherwise pick up the skills and knowledge I may not know or have little interest in. And when I am with them they learn about stuff that is not (perhaps yet) in their curriculum, though usually science and other stuff I am passionate about.
I do not trust myself to give them as well-rounded an education as I feel the combination of home and school can do, so the very thought of it being completely up to me is daunting and rather horrifying to me. There is soooo much I don't know, or am misinformed about.
And I have found the home has a huge influence in comparison, maybe just because the school is so impersonal and unyeilding. For instance: my kids take religion in their state schools. Evangelical Lutherism, basically. I could have opted out, but didn't, as it is a part of their culture I know I will not be teching them, yet one I feel they would be worse off not knowing about.
Yet at home I am teaching them to think critically. So they come home having learned all those bible stories and still think they are just that - stories. Win/win, I'd say.
I do not trust myself to give them as well-rounded an education as I feel the combination of home and school can do, so the very thought of it being completely up to me is daunting and rather horrifying to me. There is soooo much I don't know, or am misinformed about.
This scares a lot of people I think. But, from the perspective of my own autodidactishnish, by knowing how to read well, and knowing how to find and analyze information, one can learn just about everything taught in public schools.
I am comfortable with everything but advanced math and science, and by the time we need them I should be able to find the needed resources...whether dual enrollment in community college or whatever. Reading, history, basic science and math? Not a problem.
I honestly don't think anyone in my family has had a good experience with the education system. It's always been more about figuring out a way to get it over with than it has been about learning or anything.
Of course, the one I'm most familiar with is the Little Muffin. The whole time he was in school, I was just trying to figure out ways to minimize the damages. I couldn't afford private school, and I didn't have the option of homeschooling him, but if I could have figured out a way to do either one, I would have in a heartbeat.
His kindergarten teacher actually warned me that he was going to get chewed up and spit out by the school system, too. He consistently scored at the 99th percentile on every standardized test he took, and he was just an engaged, interested, curious little boy all around. So you'd think maybe the schools would welcome that and have some kind of options available for a kid like that, right?
Well, no, they didn't. If anything, I got the impression that they figured he was already scoring as high as possible on their assessment tests and bringing up their average scores, so they really didn't have any motivation to do anything for him.
We switched schools a lot trying to find something that worked. Some were better than others. Some teachers figured out ways to engage him. Sometimes, he'd get in some program or another. But for something like math, they literally did not have the necessary resources to teach him. He had one math teacher who put him in the role of tutor/teacher's assistant; and for fifth and sixth grade, a special short bus would come to pick him up to take him to a local college campus to take AP math classes with honors level high school students.
Which was good, except that after that, the schools didn't have options available for him, so he actually had to go backwards and take math classes that he'd already skipped ahead of years before. Which: No big deal. He can just skate, right? Nope. He'd come home with shitloads of excruciatingly dull, repetitive 'worksheets' as homework, and he not only had to fill in all the answers, but some of his teachers required him to 'show his work,' so even when he could look at the shit and do it in his head, he had to sit down and write out all the discrete steps in some prescriptive form that the teacher had determined was the 'correct' way to do it.
Interestingly, my brother and I had almost exactly the same experience in high school ourselves. We both took the same 9th grade advanced placement math class at the same school with the same teacher, and he accused us both of cheating when we did parts in our heads and didn't need to write out all the simple arithmetic in the middle, or even when we wrote down our process but not exactly the way he had it in the answer key. I suspect that the teacher didn't actually know that you could do math except by rote. I just took it because I was very shy and couldn't defend myself, but happily, my brother fucking OWNED THE GUY in class. He got up at the board and the teacher started throwing questions at him, and he'd just write the answers on the board. My brother is fucking awesome. (Although I'm sure the teacher asshole never thought to reconsider his accusing me.)
And pretty much everyone was accused of plagiarism in school when we'd write papers that were better quality than they expected. I once had a teacher say in front of the whole class, after an oral report, "Nice job, Lisa. Next time, don't just copy from the encyclopedia." And the LM once got an F on a (very good, well-written) paper he wrote about Karl Marx based on the single comment, "Where's your voice?" The implication of that was pretty fucking clear.
The LM was just as much a special needs student as a kid with a learning disability is. He deserved accommodations as much as anyone, but they didn't really have anything to gain from accommodating his needs, so they didn't. I even had one teacher tell me, when I complained about the volume of busywork, that doing dull, repetitive tasks for hours every day was an important skill for his future career.
As a matter of fact, I deserved better too. In second grade (I think--maybe 1st), they considering skipping me ahead a grade, but chose not to because I was already younger than my classmates, plus I was really small, which was causing me problems fitting in. Then, for the crime of looking out the window while she was talking, my teacher decided by fiat to put me in some kind of horrible special ed class instead, with incredibly disturbed kids--like not just learning disabled kids, but kids who bit. My teacher from the previous year called my parents and told them to get me out of that school before I got killed. So they did, and they put me in a private 'open' school for a couple of years, which they really couldn't afford. I tested out at the top of the grade ranges they offered, so I did not have a curriculum. My parents paid a premium for the privilege of having the school system leave me the fuck alone for two years. I did not take a single class in that time. I had a little romance, caught some snakes and stuff, and (my mom just reminded me of this the other day) I just left the campus whenever I felt like it and fucked around downtown. But you know what? After that, I went back to public schools, right into the advanced placement classes, and didn't miss a thing.
Every time I see one of those dumbassed bumperstickers that says, "If you can read this, thank a teacher," I just want to run them off the road and pound their fat smug little faces into hamburger.
We do need public schools, but the way they are now and apparently have been since the mid 60s at least, they're really not functional even as a last resort. We need more options, including homeschooling, but also including reasonable state school options for every student.
Re: Homeschooling
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