RE: Dealing with Opposition as Home Educators - @HomeEdders Challenge
I was homeschooled, and now as a librarian I see many homeschoolers using our resources to provide creative and dynamic educations to their kids. The homeschooled kids are far more likely to have good interpersonal skills, and their interest in learning is far more active.
Yes, there are outliers, students who have learning disabilities, parents who fail to educate, and kids who struggle with certain subjects, but it's not like public schools are overcoming student challenges like this. The critics want to disregard empirical data while also holding homeschoolers to a higher standard than the status quo can even meet.
As a general rule, the kids who swarm in when school lets out are sullen and dull. They wheedle and whine. They lack respect for boundaries. They only want the library because we have computers they can use for online gaming. This is overgeneralizing, I know, but the homeschooled kids tend to be capable of conversing, and like to share ideas. There is a marked contrast in the average example.
Wow! I can imagine the many behaviors and characteristics you can point out in both homeschooled and public schooled children. That’s awesome that you were homeschooled. Sometimes when I’m teaching my kids I have these thoughts wishing my parents homeschooled us. They weren’t aware of the resources back then or the positive impact it would have made on our lives. But I wouldn’t be who I am today if I didn’t go through all of those experiences in a public school. I also probably wouldn’t be as passionate about homeschooling if I didn’t know what it was like in a public school. I’m just glad I am able to give my children a different experience.
Yes it’s so funny how we are held to a higher standard, many people don’t want to see homeschooling as a mainstream option. Well too bad for them because more and more people are starting to hop onboard and pull their children out of school to teach them at home.
When we go out in public we get a lot of stares and I’ll tell you why. We have had so many people and or couples come up to us in a restaurant or a store and say along these lines
Or they will say
So we give them the answer that it helps that they have both parents in the home working together to train and discipline and they are homeschooled. It’s a nice opportunity to promote what we’re doing :)
I did attend public school briefly, and it was literally a psychologically scarring experience in some respects.
On one occasion I was the New Kid in a classroom full of out-of-towners who needed to feel superior to someone. On one hand, I saw the absurdity of another 4th grader trying to make fun of me for reading books with no illustrations, but on the other hand, it still hurt. I also remember the music teacher pullong random names to reward kids, and those who misbehaved were disqualified. All year, I behaved myself, because I am not inclined to that sort of mischief, but I never got any reward. The kids who were scolded the before seemed to get multiple chances all year. It just felt too arbitrary. I also one commented to a vullybthat a friend was not a [insert racial epithet here],
and instead of being commended for standing up to a bully, I was the one reported to the principal's office for using that word. The i justice if the system was laid bare, even if I couldn't fully comprehend it then. I was also struggling even then with undiagnosed chronic illness.
My teachers were good people, and there were some fun activites in class, but on the whole I do not have fond memories of school. It felt even then like a waste of my time to be trapped in someone else's schedule. I also hated class reading. We read out loud from books, taking turns reading a sentence at a time. Most of my classmates stumbled along slowly. I got bored, even though the books themselves were often good.
It's interesting to lopk back and be better equipped.to articulate the frustrations I felt. I wasn't equipped yet with the perspective or vocabulary then. I just knew I was deeply dissatisfied with the experience and had no objection to being homeschooled again.
Wow you had quite an experience. That was an unfortunate case about you standing up to the bully and then being the one punished?! That makes no sense.
That’s one thing I appreciate about homeschooling is that my kids don’t have to be held back waiting on other students to catch up. I want them to be able to move at their own pace.
When I taught at daycare centers the discipline problem is what held back other kids that were well behaved and wanted to learn. I was so busy breaking up fights that I didn’t have time to teach. It was really sad and heart breaking when parents arrived to pick up their kids and I had to tell them we didn’t get through all of our lesson plans that day.