I loved this. I only wish it came with an email attached so I could tell the author how great it was! http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2008/08/11/powelled_0811.html
I liked that a lot. I appreciate the fact that the author didn't feel the need to slam schools. There are just certain, unavoidable disadvantages to teaching in a school setting. With 25 or more kids, you're going to have unavoidable issues---- issues that are there regardless of whether you've got a great teacher or a poor one. I also appreciated how the author highlighted that those issues aren't part of the homeschooling atmosphere.
I have see a few others like this. I really enjoy them. It does my heart good to see hsers coming into the light. When my parents pulled us kids out it was all very quiet. No one wanted to see us out during school hours or anything. Now the atmosphere is more accepting although there are still the nay sayers. I think they are scared of us.
Sorry about that...not sure why the link isn't working for some. I hope it's ok to paste it here...if not, let me know! Home 'schooling' offers invaluable lessons By GINNY POWELL Published on: 08/11/08 When I decided to take my daughter out of the public schools (for reasons too numerous to mention) and teach her at home, I told everyone we were going to home school. I had not given the word a lot of thought before, but as we waded deeper into the minutiae of what it took to educate a preteen, the word began to bother me. Not the "home" part; even though we spend a lot of our time in museums and parks, we still are centered in the home. No, it was the "school" part that bothered me. Because what we do is not school. As a former public school student, teacher and parent, the word "school" has many connotations. First to come to mind is the building, the low, squat building, made of muted-color painted cinder block. Next I think of children, lines of them moving down the hall, mobs of them filling the cafeteria with sound, teams of them on the playground. Obviously those things have little in common with my only child sitting at the dining room table. But the difference is a lot more than that. I don't have to take roll, or do those other 100 things teachers have to do every day: "Who's having the chicken, who the beef, and who brought their lunch? Who was tardy? Which child is leading the line to the bathroom? Where's all that paperwork I need to fill out?" There is so much to keep one busy but so little added to the learning of the children. Homework. A staple of school, but what can it possibly mean in a home education setting? If my daughter has understood the lesson and demonstrated that to me, I see no reason to make her do a page full of problems. All that is likely to do is turn her off the subject. If she is having trouble with the lesson, then giving her a page of problems to do that she doesn't understand is pointless. There is no one at home wondering what we did today and thinking it couldn't be important if there's not a worksheet about it. In my day job as a college professor, I have students who literally hyperventilate and become otherwise incapacitated at the mere idea of a test, they have had so many bad experiences with them. There, I have to give them. But at home? Perhaps at major milestones (or every three years, as the state mandates), but no way am I giving weekly or monthly tests just to say I did. If a test's purpose is to evaluate a student's progress, then I would be a pretty poor teacher if I didn't already know where my daughter's ability lies. Telling her what she did wrong is only one way of furthering her education, and I don't think the best way. But, unfortunately, the most common way in schools. I am not saying there is no place for any of the trappings of "school" in schools. In fact, I believe they are unavoidable in such a setting. That's the problem. The idea that school equals education has to be called into question when these sorts of noneducational trappings take up so much of the time students spend supposedly learning. OK, so if we don't do school, what do we do? As elitist as it sounds, we learn, in the purest form possible. That means we follow our interests (I say "our" and not "her" because her interests would likely run along the same paths over and over), and turn life into a learning experience. Example: the Olympics. Let's get a world map and see where Beijing is. How far is it from our house? What would it be like to live there? What time zone is it in, so when we watch something live and it's morning here, what is it there? That looks like a cool sport, let's go look up the rules and learn to play it. That guy just broke the world record — by how much? What percentage? What was his average time over all the heats? The commentator just said something about the composition of the poles used in pole vaulting; let's find out more about that. Etc. Granted, good schools might be doing some of the same things this week, if they are in session yet. But we don't have to stop because the bell rang and it's time to change classes. Or there's a fire drill. Or someone's calling on the intercom. Or Billy in the back is acting up again. Interestingly enough, none of these things bothered me when my daughter was in school. I accepted them as inevitable. I'm not blaming schools or teachers in general for the things they have to do to make the system work as well as it can for all the students they have to serve. But to assume that a student who is in a school is necessarily being educated, in the face of all these obstacles, is ridiculous. Some education is going on, in some schools, in some classrooms, for some students. But only between all the distractions. Home schooling — or "home education" as I'm starting to call it — requires a lot of sacrifices and a lot of hard work, for both of us (in case kids are reading this and thinking they'd like to sit at home all day). But to me, it is all worth it. Because I know that my daughter is being educated, not schooled. She's learning how to live life, not how to sit still and be quiet; to be active, not passive. What is your child learning?
She made her point so well. She pointed out the inherent flaws of institutionalized education, and acknowledged that you can't really get around alot of it. Alot of what she said is exactly why I've chosen to h.s.
