The homeschoolers I have met will supplement their teaching by going to lectures by certified/degree holding persons. They will have persons with degree’s in englich or literature come in for a four or five week stint to teach harder to grasp concepts in both, or to teach the Greek plays and the like. Typically, to save and pool money, there are groups of homeschool parents that put their resources together and meet as larger groups with their kids while these concepts are taught. Almost like a small classroom, just at someone’s house or at a public place.
These kids, when they go off to college are way more intelligent and have a stronger grasp of their faith, psychological makeup, history, science, literature, languages, grammar, and the like, verses a public school student – who is dumbed down and must go to college to get what was taught in high school 50-years back. German, or Latin, French or some language is also taught. These kids are smart… and this is what the state want (I think) to curb.
They want dumbed down Darwinists running around being a good little statist, talking about secularism, talking about sex-ed and how great “alternative lifestyles” are. This is what is at the core of this legal battle that will be a stepping stone to curbing in home education that not all lifestyles are equal both morally and healthfully.
Nuts I say!
San Francisco Chronicle
Homeschoolers' setback sends shock waves through state
Friday, March 7, 2008
A
The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming.
"At first, there was a sense of, 'No way,' " said homeschool parent Loren Mavromati, a resident of
The ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of
The parents said they also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy in Sylmar (Los Angeles County), which considers the Long children part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year.
The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home…
I want to share a story by a person who decided to homeschool (actually supplement a portion of what the public doesn't teach) his kid. Very insightful. It is by an astronomer/scientist that will be pulling his kid out of school as well as teaching some homeshooled kids an area where the parents lack:
Great Article… very enjoyable.
It’s no surprise to me that
So, it shouldn’t come as a big shock to me that I need to pick up the slack for what my sons are NOT learning about science in school.
My first experience with just how bad things were occurred back in the early 1990’s. I was giving a presentation to some 5th graders when I asked the question: “When did the
No one raised their hand. In fact, most didn’t know we had ever been to the moon, and of those that did know, a substantial fraction doubted that we were there at all (parents were probably moon-landing-hoaxers).
And I have a TON of stories like that.
Fast forward to this last school year. My 7th grade son is a very good student, gets A’s in just about everything. He LOVES science, especially astronomy (imagine that) and he and I have great conversations about what the universe is like and what it’s like to be a scientist. He eats that stuff up so I know he does his best in his science class.
Yet, throughout all of last year, his grade in science was C-. In every report card.
He was devastated because he knew how important science is to me and he always thought he knew science better than all of his classmates (and I agree with him, I’ve met some of those kids. Let’s just say critical thinking doesn’t come naturally to them).
Getting that C- consistently really took a toll on him, he couldn’t understand what was going on. He really knows his stuff and always scored well on tests.
Naturally, I talked to the teacher to investigate.
It turns out my son IS a good student, DID understand the material and WAS way ahead of the other students in his comprehension of the material.
BUT, he couldn’t organize his science notebook.
“I’m sorry, he can’t organize what?”, I asked.
“His science notebook. He failed the notebook checks. They were worth 100 points each, almost 80 percent of his grade.”, the science teacher calmly explained with a huge smirk on her face.
“What does that have to do with science?”, I asked, but by then I knew what was going on and that I wasn’t about to get anywhere. I left the teacher conference furious.
I’m all too familiar with this kind of teacher. She was a stickler for organization. All materials had to be inserted in the notebooks EXACTLY and each item had to have the name in a certain place, with the information outlined EXACTLY as specified.
Now, I understand the need to teach kids organizational skills, I really do. But to make it 80% of a grade?
What this teacher really wanted was the students to do all of her work for her. She didn’t want to have to search through reams of paper to try and figure out what the student knew. She just wanted to open the notebook and start checking off the existence of items, each containing the proper words so she could get through the grading as fast as possible.
She wasn’t the slightest bit interested in whether or not the kids learned anything, only that the notebooks were in proper order.
This isn’t all though folks, not by a long shot. I mean, I could let that go if that were the only issue because he would get a different, and hopefully more competent teacher next year.
But in
Then, after March, when the pressure is off, the teachers pretty much coast through April, May and the first part of June. This is the only time when my kids have a real chance at getting a useful education, and it’s wasted because “Whew, we’re done with that test.”
The CSAP is the only thing that is actually measured, so everything else, like the actual education itself, is ignored.
I simply cannot allow my kids to come out of the education system in
So, every Tuesday and Thursday of the next school year, I’ll be pulling my then 8th grade son out of class for his last period (along with his friend and three other homeschooled students) and teaching them science.
How can I do this? Why would the school let me take the boys out like that every week? Because so long as the boys are in class for a certain percentage of the school day, the school gets the credit for them and they get paid. The principal told me that’s all they care about: getting paid. I could do whatever I wanted with them in science as long as they met certain minimum knowledge standards.
Standards they do NOT hold themselves to, by the way.
No problem though, I can meet those just by spending one hour in front a telescope with them.
The two days I’ll have them at home will be spent teaching, discussing and working on science topics with assignments to do on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I picked those two days to meet because of the seemingly infinite number of three day weekends the kids get in school for ‘planning days’ and other holidays. This would minimize any missed days due to that bullsh*t.
So now, I get to spend the rest of my summer planning a science curriculum for my son and his friends. You can bet it’ll be heavy on astronomy, but I can guarantee you that, based on what I’ve seen so far, they’ll be WAY ahead of their classmates by the time I’m done with them.
And I couldn’t care less about the state of their goddam notebooks.
