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I red a lot about it recently. This is not very well-known in Europe, so I wanted to know a bit more about that. It seems quite dangerous to me: how a child is supposed to integrate into his own society if he doesn't even attend a school with very different people? To me this isn't good for a child to grow up in a cocoon. Moreover we learn sociability in our first years. And every child needs friendship and to be confronted to someone else's eyes.
So basically I would like to learn the advantages of such a schooling and the reasons why it is so popular in America!
"I have found that having a 'high' grading scale does not indicate a difficult class. Quite the opposite. It as often as not means the test is a mere regurgitation of facts or in math the completion of comparatively simple problems where all one needs to do is turn the crank. I recall tests where being in the 60s was a solid A. But I also recall getting back the results of one such test and having the Professor when presenting the 'right' answers told us that for one of the problems he was giving us what he thought the right answer was and if any of us had something different that we thought was correct to please see him after class and explain it so he could give more points on that question.
I've also had classes where the time element was so significant that even I did not finish and I was very fast. One calculus test I took had 5 questions and we were to do 4 out of 5 questions and if any of had extra time we could do the 5th for extra credit. The instructor doubted any of would have the time for that. I did all 5, double checked everything and had time left over. Yet that other test I did not finish."
Good posts, Ella!
I've always wondered about how grades work for homeschooled kids. Just how objective it is when it's the parents doing all the teaching & the grading. Makes sense that for college admissions they want to know more about grading, textbooks used, on account of that. Definitely makes sense that homeschooled kids should be required to take more standardized tests to get into a good college. Unless they went to an online school where they had real teachers, real grading, not just mommy grading everything.
Some universities, especially those with high acceptance rates and a relaxed application process, are far more receptive to home-schooled applicants than ones with competitive admission. As I discussed in a post above, a home-schooled friend of mine was despondent after being rejected by all of the eleven universities in the United States she devoted considerable time and energy to applying to, laboring over the applications and ensuring she'd put in her best efforts. She was denied admission to nine of them outright, and then crushed even more after the two who wait-listed her held hope above her head and then took it away when they too did not admit her. She was also rejected by two universities in England, where she resided at the time. I recommended a university in New Brunswick, Canada I'd actually learned about from a home-schooled woman, specifically because they have a "holistic" application process and are very welcoming to home-schooled applicants. It is a relatively respectable college, but perhaps due to its isolated and inhospitably cold location does not attract very many applicants, and has a remarkably high acceptance rate. They actually reject so few applicants they are able to send personalized letters to each one detailing why the candidate was not admitted and giving him or her the opportunity to take corrective action and apply again. Their admit rate is the inverse of many elite universities; around 90% admitted rather than denied. It has rolling admissions, which enabled her to apply only a couple of months before the school year began. Unlike all the universities in the US and England she applied to, this university does not require any standardized tests, letters of recommendation, essays, or examples of academic work. It's a very basic application. She was not required to provide any details about the rigor or content of her education, with the transcript her mom made for her being deemed sufficient. The only standardized assessment she completed was one for music, that was very basic and completed online. They enthusiastically admitted her and offered her a full scholarship, but after actually visiting the school she decided to instead wait to hear from the two schools that had wait-listed her (she didn't find out until December that they had, and the school year began in August). She is now enrolled in a rigorous online high school so she will have an official transcript and will not be considered a home-school applicant, and has been taking SAT and ACT prep classes. She will soon be submitting her applications to elite colleges in the US and UK again.
Cimorene is no longer active here but she told me that it is OK to say which online school she went to. It is Stanford Online High School. My understanding is that it is mainly real classes connected through the video on most computers. So one still has the commitment to be there on time, just that there is in front of your computer instead of in a building on campus.
Bolding mine. While I would have loved to focus on the subjects I liked but that would have resulted in a grossly inferior education. I would have been years ahead in math and science and lacking in history and English.
I honestly do not see how my parents could have provided a reasonable substitute for brick and mortar school for High School. The knowledge to teach math and science would have been there, but a huge part of real science is lab work and while getting the materials for biology would have worked out OK for chemistry and physics there would have been major cost issues. A full set of glassware for chemistry is not cheap and one also needs a lab counter with a gas outlet for the Bunsen burner. And the ways stand now there would be difficulties getting a lot of the chemicals needed. (There are lots of nasty things that can come out of a good chem lab).
And the problem with lab work would have been exacerbated by my ability. I would probably been a couple of years ahead of schedule in the sciences. Math would have been even more of an issue. My mom could have taught it well, but she would have been rusty and she would have had problems once we were past college calculus.
Still once upon a time it could be argued that home schooling allowed students to progress at a far faster speed in the subjects where they had aptitude. This is far less true today. School systems allow rapid advancement through magnets and other means.
I don't want to give the impression that I think the current school system is perfect or even all that good. I just do not see home schooling as a viable solution.
I do however see learning at home as an important part of learning. I was cooking gourmet meals at 16. At or before 12 I was making devices that required hand soldering on a circuit board. Earlier than that I was doing Euclidian constructive geometry. By 16 I could take down or top a tree using a chainsaw (though topping was dangerous work and my parents did not allow me to do it).
It seems to me that those favoring home schooling are making an implicit assumption that if someone is going to a physical school they cease learning elsewhere. That is simply untrue. But there may be cases where their parents cease actively teaching and if so I would say those parents are not doing their job.
Writing walls of text really do help me to chill out during Dead Week, haha.
I'd choose the opposite, and would consequentially have an equally inferior education due to the imbalance. Condoleezza Rice spoke at my secondary school when I was in the 8th grade, and the advice that embedded into me was to take classes not just in the subjects that you gravitate towards because they are your forte, but the ones that intimidate and challenge you. That if you are naturally gifted in English but recede from math classes, to make a concerted effort to take more demanding math classes to exercise what you are weaker in. And vice versa. It's not just the content of the class itself, though obviously the knowledge gained is valuable, but broadening yourself and learning the art of perseverance. The school has an excellent, well-rounded curriculum, so regardless of aptitude or desire all students must take courses in diverse subjects. At the time, I saw the advice as being more about the attitude I chose to have rather than the choices I could actually make, but as I progressed through high school and into college I did take it more literally.
I've always been skittish about STEM courses because in comparison to my brothers, I'm not as agile in them. They didn't seem to be as relevant to my interests and ambitions, either, but over time I actually discovered they very much are. I admit I still had to be dragged into taking some classes in high school, and had to wrestle with myself to enroll in and not drop some of them that scared me in college. My HS AP Biology, AP Statistics, AP Macroeconomics, and AP Microeconomics classes have been the most useful I've taken, and they are classes I wouldn't have taken without Dr. Rice's advice and my parents' prodding. I definitely wouldn't have taken the AP exams if my mom hadn't made me, because my college doesn't award credit for any of those classes, and I saw the preparation as being an additional and futile stress. But those scores are what enabled me to be able to jump right into classes without taking the prerequisites first. Because of my background in statistics I was able to take a course on biostatistics that is relevant to my passion about vaccination and public health care. Because of the background in economics I was able to leapfrog into higher level economics, and then from them into ones being taught at my college's business school. I'm not a business major. My classes on economic policy have been taught by the former Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council for the Bush administration. They are not required for my major, but extremely beneficial.
I knew I'd never be a science major, but I also took nine science classes in high school (four year-long classes, two summer classes, and three semester-long electives) and thus far have taken ten at college. I also audited a three week Sophomore College seminar at Stanford when I was attending the OHS called Measles, Sneezles, and Things that Go Mumps in the Night, hahaha. My brick-and-mortar school has a science scholar program where students are paired with mentors to conduct research that is then published. I worked with a psychologist, and continued the research I did then at college, and presented it at the national APA conference over the summer.
Even parents who possess higher levels of knowledge in a subject may not have the skills to effectively teach that knowledge in an age-appropriate way. One of the reasons for the success of Bill Nye "the science guy" is his ability to teach complex science lessons in a way that is fully comprehensible, engaging, and memorable to kids.
As I wrote in a previous post, home-school programs are often designed to be taught by parents or teachers (they are also used in Christian schools, many of which are unaccredited and do not require that the teachers have credentials) who lack expertise in the subject, so they rely more on workbooks and rote memorization. Rather than the teachers creating lesson plans of their own, they typically just follow the system, teaching scripted drills the students parrot.
They are not as dynamic as a class at a brick and mortar school or an online one where there is interaction with skilled teachers as well as with peers. I think the interaction part is also crucial, not just with teachers but with fellow classmates, learning from them and collaborating on projects. Having a teacher who is truly qualified to evaluate work rather than just marking it using an answer key is very important, too.
Another issue is that some fields, such as Computer Science, are perpetually evolving, so what a parent learned while in grad school may be obsolete when their kids are in middle and high school grades. Yes, most definitely a parent with a strong background in CS would be much more capable of quickly learning and teaching lessons, but it would require effort on their part to learn what they are teaching.
The homeschool publisher Abeka's math program has been especially criticized for only using what they refer to as "traditional" math and rejecting modern theories.
Definitely.
All students enrolled in a high school within the LAUSD is entitled to enroll in their online classes for free, which enables them to take more advanced classes (and also to repeat classes and take ones of interest that aren't offered at their brick and mortar school). Many school districts have a similar policy, as well as full K-12 virtual schools. The Malone Family Foundation provides scholarships to gifted kids who still need more challenges for them to be able to attend Stanford OHS and other comparable schools.
A while ago someone posted excerpts from an article in Stanford Magazine titled "In a class of their own" about home-schooled students who were admitted to Stanford and thriving. The quotes were severed from crucial context, the key one being the date of the article, 2000, with all the kids having completed their high school-level education in the 1990s. The second most important detail omitted was that there were literally only a handful of home-schooled students at Stanford (four in 1999, 5 in 2000) then, and some were enrolled in correspondence programs. There are still only a few home-schooled students here. In the pre-internet era gifted kids were sometimes shuttled from their elementary schools to middle or high schools or college for more advanced classes. Some were enrolled in correspondence programs such as the one Stanford used to offer before the OHS was founded in the mid-2000s. The older brother of a friend who went to a gifted school with me when we were little is the youngest-ever graduate of the University of Chicago's medical school. My friend went on to earn a Masters degree by the age of 18. The gifted school still wasn't sufficient for them, so their mom home-schooled them until they were old enough to be admitted into online college programs. They are, of course, the exceptions, not the norm.
There's not a singular school system. I think one of the issues with American schools is that their quality is so often dependent upon the socioeconomics of the area it's located in, whereas in some (much smaller) countries all schools are federally funded.
I do think attending school at home is a viable solution for some kids, but only if they are enrolled in a quality online school. I'm guesstimating that around 70% of the kids who are competitive dancers are home-schooled, but they're all in online schools, either public or private. Most began their schooling in brick-and-mortar schools and then transitioned into online schooling around age ten, which is when you typically start training around 20-25 hours a week. They're in a unique circumstance because they are still fully immersed in social settings where they're interacting with kids outside of their own families, from different backgrounds.
My family has long embraced the maxim about how learning should be a part of life from "the womb to the tomb."
Homeschool curriculums worth their salt have very stringent marking protocols and rubrics as part of the curriculum. "Mommy" isn't just assigning arbitrary marks. There are so many options available now. DVD and online classes taught and marked by trained professionals. As far as colleges and universities, most have personnel hired specifically as liaisons to help homeschool students apply because they are coveted by the schools.
The studies show that homeschoolers are leaps and bounds ahead of students coming out of the public school system.
If you plan to attend University in Ontario, homeschoolers do not even need a high school diploma. You just need six grade 12 Academic credits. These credits can be granted by a parent.
Let's face it, if a student goes to University and can't cut the mustard, it is going to show up very quickly. Universities are not finding this to be the case. Homeschool students are exceeding their expectations.
Now, I'm not wanting to start up another drama, am still scratching my head on how we ended up having any in this thread in the 1st place, lol. For anybody wondering there was a big clean up here. On account of the homeschooled gal who was posting here being known for anti vaxxer posts I'm wondering if that's a common overlap? Are more folks who homeschool anti vaxx? I could see how anti vaxx beliefs would be more common with fundamentalists who reject est. science. (I do know not all folks who homeschool are fundies btw)
Hello Ella,
Thanks for contacting me. I appreciate your desire to get people to protect themselves, and I share your frustration when it comes to people ignoring facts because of their preconceived notions. I think that for those who tend to use my curriculum, it does help to discuss things taking their faith into account. So, for example, when I talk with people like that one-on-one, I discuss the concept of the Fall of Man, and how that corrupted the world. That corruption led to sickness and disease, and vaccinations are simply one way we deal with that corruption.
“I don’t know anyone who has ever had whooping cough, or rubella, or whatever other made-up diseases we are supposed to believe threaten our kids. But what I do know is that whenever we are in the minivan, the only thing Isaac wants to hear is The Wiggles… and I seriously want to drive off a bridge,” said Mrs. Melun while sewing a Misfits patch onto a onesie. “Although, Rubella would be a sick band name…”
Even though their child is only 15-months old, the Meluns have already decided on homeschooling in an effort to control their child’s musical exposure.
“We are his parents. We know what is best for him,” said Mr. Melun, lighting up a cigarette.
Which online school do you go to?
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