

The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List - Alex3917
http://www.familyhack.com/2007/11/09/homeschooler-rant/

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greendestiny
Homeschooling might be great, but if the author finds it insulting when people
suggest they can't teach early grades because the material is so easy it makes
me worry that they know nothing about education. I don't think successfully
educating young kids has a lot to do with knowing the material or not, past a
certain level of familiarity anyway.

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Alex3917
I was thinking the same thing myself while reading the article. But playing
devil's advocate, they don't exactly teach a lot of theory to education majors
either, let alone those in teachers cert. programs.

Personally I decided to put off graduating a few more weeks to take, among
other things, a human development course in child cognition because lately
I've been wondering how closely the parenting books mirror what's being
published in scientific journals. If I learn anything useful then I'll post it
at some point in the future.

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greendestiny
Actually my wife is a teacher of young kids here in Australia and they do
quite a lot of developmental psych, even more in the special needs graduate
stuff she did. For the higher grades there seems to be very little, which goes
some way to explain a lot about the crap high school teachers out there.

Most people seem to feel you need a good high school, but for my kids I really
want to concentrate on the early years of learning. Home schooling in high
school would probably be a massive improvement, but kids seem pretty happy to
be with their friends then.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what you find out. I'm about 6 weeks away from being
a father for the first time, so I'm very interested in the topic.

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Alex3917
As I said I haven't taken the class yet, but if you haven't already, check out
Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence. It's really scary to realize not only
does EI play a much greater role in future success than IQ, but that the brain
is 85% percent formed by age five, after which EI is basically fixed. The good
news though is that maximizing this is mostly a function of doing easy things
like holding your child for the requisite amount of time each day and such. I
guess my point is that it seems important focus first on the stuff you can't
fix later if you mess up.

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greendestiny
Cool I'll have a look. Freakonomics analysis of schooling also suggests that
early years are also more important.

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bayareaguy
The wife of my brother in law is a homeschool evangelist.

The bad side of me wants to commit this list to memory so that I'll be
prepared the next time I see her. :-)

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yters
Were/are many of you homeschooled?

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curi
I wanted to be. Does that count? :)

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yters
Yeah, it's more about the attitude towards learning, so I'd say so. The main
way homeschool benefited me was to not kill my intellectual curiosity (and
give me plenty of time and freedom to do my own investigation).

