bomba923 said:
Assuming you have the time of course,
Would you guys favor homeschooling as an approach to a child's education?
Is there more risk involved, albeit with greater academic opportunity?
I was homeschooled from grade 4 to 8.
By grade 8 I was doing grade 10 math. Why? Because there was nobody else in my class, nobody to slow me down, nobody to force me to speed up. I worked at my own pace for 4 years.
It depends on the child, my best friend was also homeschooled, and I live in a small town so my social life wasn't lacking because of it.
I am now in grade 12 at a private high school (Ashbury College) in Ottawa Canada. I also have a $5k scholarship to the school, and am doing the IB program. I'm not trying to brag, if I hadn't been homeschooled I don't think I would be where I am today, I definitely wouldn't have gotten the scholarship, and my parents would never have seen my maths/sciences potential and wouldn't have even considered sending me to Ashbury. I'd probably be attending the local high school where they call the graduating class the "Potential Grads" because there is such a low graduation rate.
Homeschooling allows you to discover your childs strong and not so strong subjects, and allows the child to learn those subjects at an individual rate. This is the biggest advantage toward homeschooling I would say. I was always poor in French, so I studied that subject at a slower rate. Since I was strong in math, I went at a faster pace.
It also teaches the child extremely good study habits at an early age, depending on how your "homeschool" is set up. My dad worked, my mom stayed at home and basically guided me in teaching myself. She was always there (as was my dad) to help me when I needed it, however for the most part I tought myself, I worked through the lessons of the textbooks and then did the excersizes. If I had trouble, I went to my parents and they guided me in the right direction.
Homeschooling also allows you to select the subjects to teach and how to teach them. For example, in grade 4 at a public school, kids don't do any form of current events (or not at the school I attended prior to homeschooling). At home, I had to write a brief summary of a news story that I saw on the 12:00 news, or read the newspaper and do a summary of an article. Not only did this teach me english skills at an early age, but it informed me of what was going on in the world, and that in itself can teach one much more than a textbook.
Ok, now for some disadvantages (and how they were overcome):
Although it depends on the homeschoolers, I never had homework, and I never had grades. I had tests although not to the scale that schools do.
However I didn't need homework, because everything was done at home. Homework in school at a young age is given (I think) for one main reason. There isn't enough time in class to finish the work. This is because it takes the teacher so long to teach a lesson. Why? Because she has to adjust to the paces of everyone, so the students all learn at the pace of the slowest student. A team is only as strong as its' weakest member. At home, I did a lesson, and I did the work associated with that lesson until it was finished, homeschooling is flexible, so I didn't have time limits on classes, I just worked away until I was finished. I did the work at my own pace, my parents noticed that I flew through the math lessons, so they started getting me to do 2 lessons per morning, because it was my strong subject. In school I would have been held back by students who weren't so strong, and would not have been able to develop my math skills to my potential.
I never had grades because there wasn't really a need for them. My parents knew how well I was doing, because they knew exactly what I was doing. A major problem with public schools is the lack of communication between parents and the school (the schools fault not the parents). Grades give a teacher a way of telling the parents how well their child is doing, however the problem is that it does nothing more than inform. It doesn't actually solve the problem if a student is doing poorly. At homeschool, the parents don't need grades because they know how well their child is doing, and if the child is doing poorly, they can solve the problem, they can change the curriculum, the type of work, the lessons, they can adjust everything to the needs of their child. At school this can't be done because the school has to teach according to the general needs of the entire class. Tests are the same way. My math textbook had tests at the end of every 10 lessons or so, and I did these tests. They told my parents whether or not I was ready to move on. If I was, I moved on, if I wasn't, I went back and re-learned what I needed to.
I hope that this helps,
I think it is the longest post I have ever written, however if you are seriously considering homeschooling, please read it all.
-Jon
That is, a child's education doesn't stop when they leave the school grounds, and good parents always continue to supplement their child's learning at home.
But, that meant I was continuing to practice those assignments during the summer, even if I thought it was just play.)
