First things first: go read this. Yes, the whole thing. Yes, I know it’s longish, you lazy bum, you’ll be fine; it’s well written and funny and interesting and you’ll learn stuff. I’ll wait.
An anecdote: I had a (rare) winter birthday party at OtherJob… two weekends ago, I think? It was weird; there were twice as many kids there as parents, but the families were fun and the kids were cute and I’m pretty sure birthday mom was flirting with me (mentioning my wife and my prominent wedding ring didn’t cure the behavior; I’m not sure if that should change my opinion about whether she was flirting) and all in all I’d rather have had them there than been alone all day. It was pretty apparent from the jump that all of the kids were pretty bright, and I was keeping half an ear open to the conversations that were happening around the room as the party went on. Toward the end of the party I actually asked mom where her kids went to school, and she named a school in a neighboring district and then, unsolicited, told me she moved into that district specifically to get away from the one I teach in. Not my school, mind you, but my district.
I winced. “Ouch,” I said. “I teach for them.”
She instantly turned massively apologetic, which really wasn’t what I was going for, and I quickly made a point to her that I’ve made to others: I don’t judge anybody for the educational choices they make for their kids. Well, okay, sometimes I do; I’ll get to one example later. But I really try hard not to judge anybody for the educational choices they make for their kids, so long as that choice involves actually trying to educate their child. This lady made the choice she thought was best for her kid, and given that I’d been watching the kid pretty carefully over the last few hours and wholeheartedly approved of her parenting, I was hardly in a position to be judgy even if I’d wanted to be.
Back to the article: the author is one of my oldest friends; I’ve known her since college, before any of the three kids or before she even met the husband she’s been married to for ten-plus years. (I think? Definitely before they started dating. I remember when they started dating; I kinda had a crush on her never mind.)
She homeschools her kids, which you’d know if you read the article, I told you to read the article, why haven’t you read the article yet? Go read the article! She’s doing a great job; her daughter is smarter than me already. The entire piece is about why she and her husband made the choices they did in educating their kids, and dispelling some common ideas non-homeschoolers have about homeschooling.
I suspect I can read your mind right now; you’re expecting me to go into a point-by-point teardown of everything she said, punctuated by lots of I love this person, really, but she’s totally wrong about this and here’s why sorts of disclaimers. Not so. In fact, I agree with just about every damn thing she says, and on the one place where I’m going to disagree with her it’s to take a more pro-homeschooling position than she did.
I had a conversation with my wife last night about whether she’d be open to homeschooling the boy if it were possible. She said flat-out that she wanted nothing to do with it. Me… not so much. If I’m being honest, I’d homeschool the boy in a second if it were a realistic option. I’m in love with the Jeffersonian model of education; I am the person I am because I taught myself to be. Very little of what I know that I think is important is stuff I learned in a classroom, and the idea of getting to spend a few hours a day with my son just exposing him to the world around him is wonderful beyond compare. However, a lot of the reasons my friend discusses that allow her to homeschool their kids are reasons why I cannot homeschool my own son:
- As I’ve discussed before, yes, both pairs of grandparents are in town. But my son has no cousins and honestly I’d be at least mildly surprised if he ever had any; there’s only one uncle with a chance to produce offspring, and even assuming he’s interested, by the time said offspring comes around Kenny will be too old for that child to be much of a playmate;
- My wife and I are not joiners. We don’t go to church and aren’t big go-do-stuff people; where socialization is not really a concern for my friend’s kids (and she makes a very good argument for why it’s not) it would be a huge concern for mine. If Kenny didn’t go to day care he would have barely any reason to know other children even exist. The fact that we are not at this time planning on another kid is another point against homeschooling; there are literally no kids around for my son to interact with, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
- She has some issues (some entirely unrelated to the quality of education available, mind you) with her local schools, both private and public. By sheer luck I happen to have bought a house in the district of one of the best (public) primary schools in my area, and the local middle schools are pretty good too. I have concerns with the high schools, but that’s a long way away.
- If I have a real criticism of her piece, it’s this: She’s able to homeschool her kids because she and her husband can afford for her to be home homeschooling their kids. That flat-out is not an option for my wife and I, and it’s not likely to change anytime soon. If one of us stayed home, it would be me; I make (slightly) more than my wife does, and even a 10-20% reduction in our combined take-home pay would kill us, to say nothing of over 50%. The economics of homeschooling are a very real and serious thing. Even if I thought it was the best option for my kid, it’s literally impossible for us. Note that, in the interest of fairness, I have no idea what kinds of economic sacrifices she and her husband might be making for her to stay home, but the fact that they live in a house and not the cement-board-reinforced cardboard box my wife and I would quickly be relegated to means that they’re still better off than us in this regard.
All that said, this is the part I actually want to talk about, and to offer some support on. Forgive the lengthy quote but I know your ass hasn’t clicked on that link yet:
Naysayers say: I’m not sure I know enough to teach my kid
There seem to be two different types of people who make this response about homeschooling. First, there are people who maybe are not college-educated or are for some whatever reason just concerned about their own lack of elementary knowledge. In these cases, I’d say the parent should go with their gut feeling. If they feel like they are able to guide a student through with the help of a curriculum, then they probably can. If they feel like they cannot, then they probably shouldn’t, because even if they would get along much better than they think their lack of confidence may prevent them from enjoying it. And there is no reason a person should take on a job that pays no money if they’re not going to enjoy it.
The second kind of person is usually a person who is comfortable with their own pool of basic knowledge, but is concerned that educating a seven-year-old requires special skills that their own branch of graduate school (or whatever) didn’t cover. I really don’t think this is true. I spent some time in education programs myself, though my degrees are in other areas. Education programs don’t prepare a parent to teach their own seven-year-old nearly as well as parenting their child for the first six years of his or her life did. I don’t mean to knock teachers, or the value of training in pedagogy in particular for upper grades, and I am incredibly grateful for the support and advise I get from my mother, who is a retired elementary school teacher. But I don’t think my homeschooling friends who don’t have my mother or specialized education training are ill-equipped to teach their own children. There is a great array of materials and advice available to homeschooling parents, and it can be sufficient. There isn’t any special kind of magic that gets sprinkled on schools so that learning can only happen In That Designated Space, and only by Licensed Teachers. People get so used to our culture of licensure, specialization, and lack of do-it-yourselfness (is that a thing?) that they believe it’s countercultural or scary to teach their own child when people did it with no training or second thoughts for a zillion years before our current educational system became standard.
I’ll go further than that: any parent who is a) possessed of the basic skills that we expect of, say, a high school student and b) actually invested enough in the education of their kids to want to homeschool is probably perfectly qualified to homeschool their own child, at least through the elementary years before things start to specialize. And I say that as a fully licensed teacher, one who, if he had his way, would live in a society with no options other than public schools, because the public schools were so good that no one even considered any other option.
Here’s the thing: I’m trained to teach classes, not individual kids. I’m ferdamnsure better than most people at managing and educating twenty-six kids at a time, of balancing the needs of Julie the Genius against Jimmy the fetal alcohol syndrome kid with a 60 IQ. I can differentiate my instruction like a motherfucker; I can navigate curriculum, I “speak teacher” in a way that somebody who doesn’t teach simply can’t.
Doesn’t mean shit for specifically educating your kid. Under most circumstances, parents should at least in theory be better for educating their kid than I would be as a teacher of classrooms of twenty-six. But we have schools because that model doesn’t work for most people; we specialize our jobs in this country and I teach your kids so that you have time to do something else that I need. If you can read and comprehend the curriculum in front of you, you can probably do a serviceable job of teaching your kid.(*) Just don’t get the idea that that means you can teach my class. It’s a very different set of skills.
There’s about to be a very long parenthetical, and I’m already at 2000 words, so lemme bring this to a close: do what you think you need to do with your kid, but have the flexibility to change your mind if your circumstances change. Just make sure your decision making is reasonable and realistic and think your way through everything you can before you make the decision. That’s all.
(*) Probably. And “if.” I can think of at least two families from my current school who have pulled their kids for “homeschooling” or who have threatened to do so who I would happily report to DCFS for child endangerment in a second if “these cretins are trying to homeschool” were actually legal ground for said report. Every teacher knows the stereotypes, and in this case I think the stereotypes exist for a reason; all the homeschooled kids who ended up back in school I’ve ever met were either brilliant wunderkinder whose parents economic circumstances changed or clearly should have been removed from their families years ago– I had a fourth grader come in in my first school whose “homeschooling” had involved using the library for a babysitter for a year. The kid couldn’t do basic arithmetic– like, at all– could only barely read, and at one point was revealed to have no idea what a “planet” was– but was clearly socially well-adjusted and had no learning disabilities. He’d just been entirely without education for most of his life because his parents didn’t give a damn.
And yes, I’m aware that every parent who does make the choice to send their kids to school has at least one horror story about a teacher. Fully aware. Some of those stories are about me. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine what they are(**) and whether they’re true or not.(***)
(**) He tried to eat my kid!!!
(***) Only a little.
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Very interesting read, and so is the linked homeschool read. It cleared up some questions I had about students homeschooled. I still would have concerns for children homeschooled who do not have access to outside socialization, and I would have concern for those educated by parents who may not necessarily know their stuff. If I was taught by my parents, I would still think the world was flat, tomatoes were vegetables, germs and bacteria cannot hurt you so do not worry about about that, and pluto is still a planet.
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Regardless of the pathway chosen, the end result of every educational endeavor serves but a single purpose in the final analysis – – to allow those who are taught to rise to the highest level of incompetency attained by those doing the teaching and then to put the learning to use in pragmatic situations with a lot of trial and error along the way until some plateau of achievement is either attained or sacrificed to some other altruism.
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Ya coulda just said “derp,” dude. Fewer letters.
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I’m homeschooled, sort of; not a traditional “parents teach me” homeschool. It’s a virtual, online public (read: free) school that I’ve now spent 5 years in. Before that, I did a DVD based, more traditional homeschool program where mom taught. Anyway…
Most people, like you said in this article and also what was written in the linked one, think that we’re lazy, unsociable, awkward, and overall inferior in knowledge. Do I know some of these homeschoolers who fit the bill? Yes. But in the end, it **usually** comes down to the temperament and attitude of the kid and the effort the parent puts in, not to mention the parenting strategy taken. When you do a bad parenting job and let the kid slack at his work, what do you think is going to happen? Make the lesson fun, encourage the kid, help them, etc. what do you think is going to happen?
You get out what you put in. Good homeschooled kids are a product of good homeschooling parents.
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I’ve been curious about those online schools, boyscout: how much contact do you actually have with your teachers? Is there anything in place other than an honor system to assure your teachers that it’s you and not your parents doing your work? How do they actually work?
(I ask because I have done college-level online classes, and the answer was “none,” I’d like to see some more accountability from something targeted at younger people.)
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Well, I have as much or as little contact with my teachers as I want. For younger elementary/middle school kids, they’re required to attend “LiveLessons,” which are essentially PowerPoint presentations given live by the teacher. Usually, there’s one or two a week per class. In high school, they assume we can handle ourselves and are responsible and smart enough to keep it under control, so LiveLessons are optional rather than mandatory
Aside from that, I can call my teacher during office hours, which run usually from 8-4 or 9-5 like a regular schoolday. There’s an e-mail system for contact, they can draw on a virtual whiteboard etc.(very helpful for Algebra and Geometry).
Basically, I have as much or as little contact as I want at this point, as long as I check in at least once a month with a teacher.
As far as accountability is concerned, it’s getting better as they go along. Now we have tests (all online) which time out after a certain amount of time and the questions may change order or be replaced with new ones if you time out of the test or if you exit the test and re-open it later. That way, we can’t print out the answers, look them up, then come back later. Aside from that, our parents have to approve each lesson and confirm we actually did it… this works in theory, as long as the parents are trustworthy. For what it’s worth, we have to sign an Honor Code statement initially, so we’re techinically legally bound (I think) but I don’t know how well they enforce it. I don’t plagiarize or anything, so I wouldn’t know firsthand.
As far as knowing whether we did the work or our parents… we’re still required to take state tests, so if our grades in school are really high, but our standardized test scores are really crappy, that’s a big red flag. Again, I don’t know about other ways to know who’s doing the work since I do it all honestly anyhow haha
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I’ve been homeschooling for a really long time, and I have no delusions that I’m qualified to teach in a classroom. OTOH, subject specialization for higher grades is less of an issue than you’d think. There are so many great resources online that the issue is more not getting distracted by too much work in the subjects you like as opposed to your kid being clueless and alone while dealing with complex Maths or Stoichiometry. I think doing an informed reading of Shakespeare, especially with today’s resources, is much easier than teaching a 7 year old to read.
My kids have done several online classes, and teacher involvement has ranged from non-existent to available whenever they needed help or encouragement. That pretty much mirrors my own traditional high school experience, when I think back on it.
Homeschooling isn’t the magic cure for every kid with schooling woes or the answer to the education crisis of our society, but it did work well as an emergency solution for our family. My son recently got accepted to the Engineering program of a very good university. Thanks for not being that teacher who frothed at the mouth at me last summer and told me that I’d shirked my moral duty to society by not putting my kids in public school.
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Thanks, it was interesting to hear from regular people who can speak rationally about this.
I was homeschooled by fundie parents at the “almost entirely wackadoo,” part of the spectrum. I maintain that I was well educated until about high school, but that I would have benefited from regular classes at that point. Still, it would have been difficult for me and my parents, and I have no guarantees that I would have gotten the attention I needed to actually learn math and science, or to be more confident instead of depressed and shy.
I am all for homeschooling as long as it’s good for the kids. You are also absolutely right that it’s a huge financial sacrifice for one parent to stay home.
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Great post.
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I have been a classroom teacher in Texas for 31 years. No brag, just fact. I know for a fact that most other qualified teachers don’t want my job (ESL teacher in a Texas high school- the little buggers don’t all speak English (or even Spanglish) too good). So now I have to decide (since other teachers only like to give my kids BIG RED F’s) whether I want to retire and home school my eighth grader and possibly my sixth grader. Hoo-eee! Do I even like my kids that much? Well, I probably do. It could probably turn out to be the source of infinite funny posts about teaching. But if I do it, I do it for the Gods of Comedy, not the Texas Education Gods.
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I enjoyed your response. I wish we all lived closer so Worth and Kenny could “socialize.” 🙂 I considered talking about budget ramifications but decided against it since it’s not really something that can be generally addressed. We know parents who homeschool and both work full time, but then at least one parent is on a non-traditional schedule (like a nurse) who is able to share the school work with a spouse and often another caregiver such a grandparent. In our situation the budget thing almost works in our favor right now, since there is basically no chance that I could get a job with enough flexibility to allow me to help Rob with his office books, which is a thing I do, plus pay for the cost of care for two younger children, plus make up for the increased costs related to me working (like clothes that aren’t yoga pants, fewer dinners from scratch, no more time for sewing kid clothes, etc). If my staying home with the youngest ones right now is more or less a break-even thing, then being able to homeschool while I’m at it is just icing on the cake. I figure we can always recalculate as they all get older and I get more tired of yoga pants.
Oh, and just to set the record absolutely straight on the timeline: Renata and Rob’s first date and kiss, December 1996. Renata met Infinitefreetime in religion class, January 1997. 😉
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I am not convinced of the validity of this timeline.
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Well, I didn’t marry him until 2003–the relationship unfolded slowly. And I might have played you a little. XO
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Nice piece. I read your friend’s post and loved it. I am hoping to homeschool our children, but my husband is resistant. It seems that his big issue is the socialization issue, but when he opens up about his experience in school…it sounds HORRENDOUS. He was seriously bullied and it breaks my heart. My experience was much better than his.
I always worry about speaking up about my desire to homeschool because I fear that people will think I am making a judgement on teachers. I have friends and family who are/were educators and they are all fantastic, but I think homeschooling will work best for they way we like to live our lives. Plus, I think the Charlotte Mason philosophy is AMAZING and I cannot wait to dive into it.
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Nice. I like your outlook and all of this commentary.
There are so many angles here. My family has homeschooled for many years. There were eight children. I’ve been a single mom for a little while now. Two of my kids chose to attend school, one in high school and one in 8th grade (don’t ask!). I am a public educator. I teach in a community college and run a community learning center on a micro-scale farm. I still have one high school age kid who homeschools.
We’re very freeform.
All of my kids are productive citizens. Many have gone through the community college system and some have gone on to university. One did a paid congressional internship in DC. One is trying to decide grad school or med school. Some did not go to or did not finish college. They are not ax murderers or in jail. They work hard and are intelligent people.
Sometimes when asked why I wanted to homeschool I tell people “because I want to make sure they learn about evolution and they learn it right.” That’s one of the things I teach, human evolution. People tend to just blink at me when I say that. Truth be told, it had most of all to do with educational freedom. I don’t regret it. And more truth be told, socialization takes many forms. Making same-age friends can be a problem if a child is homeschooled in an isolated region with no access to other families or even the internet.
When the majority of my kids were home and homeschooling I was married and we were pretty poor but I ran a casual learning farm and did things like childbirth education and freelance writing from home while the ex had a decent job. We barely got by, but the kids were having a good time and learning a lot. Our home farm was grand central for plenty of kids.
If it works well, it works well. It’s not for everyone but it can be a good choice.
And now I’m going to follow your blog. Thanks for coming over to look at mine.
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I’ve taught in real schools and like you I was pretty good at it–not that a single education course helped in any way (except maybe for mentioning color-coded filing systems). My kids were bored at school, I had already given up the idea of living in an actual house (lived in a roach infested apartment in Brooklyn) so I had no problem giving homeschooling a try. We ate beans and rice ($30 food budget, ugly old clothes, no car etc.).
The kids learned more in 2 hours than they learned in a week and I pretty much let them figure it all out (even the 1st grader). My son went back to school because he wanted tons of friends–looking back I should have waited until he joined the peewee football squad before making the decision. My daughter went back to school because we fought too much about math. I let her sleep in until noon in order to avoid having the daily fight about multiplication. She still was about a year ahead of her class upon return.
My husband was 100% opposed to homeschooling. Unless both parents want it, it will probably fail. We went to a home-schooling rollerskating party once and my husband couldn’t deal with the uncool kids. he didn’t want nerds for kids. (we divorced, btw). 🙂
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I homeschooled my daughter from 2nd grade on. It was the BEST decision. All of the things I wanted for her in education I got. I live in Los Angeles, LAUSD is notoriously horrible. 70 plus kids in a class, no books, crap shoot on teacher quality. Private school is 30-40 thousand a year. With homeschooling my daughter was able to experience a lot more things because she wasn’t tied to a classroom wasting time all day listening to the district prescribed material which wouldn’t serve her well in college. My story with homeschooling is a success… but its difficult and not for everyone.
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Well, I read all of both posts all through (I’m like that). I can see that homeschooling in the right circumstances would be fine and in others might be disastrous. I agree, being a misfit at school is not good training for adulthood. However, I do have one worry. I’m not sure how open-minded children would become if their main authority figures do not vary. So the wider world is seen only through Mummy and Daddy’s lenses. I know there are, in this case, a multitude of other activities in which they engage, but I still worry that no other adult’s opinion will get onto an equal footing with these parent/teachers. I was going to expand on this, but enough said.
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Former classroom educator of 20+ years turned homeschool mom. Trust me, I NEVER thought I’d end up here. Of course, pursuing the dream of being a teacher since age 10, I also never thought I’d leave teaching, but I did (or rather it left me). When my “bored since kindergarten kid” and myself as a “rebel in a robotic classroom” couldn’t take it anymore, we bailed. SCARY.
Though my husband still teaches public school (and we’re broker than broke), I wouldn’t trade it for the world. These days learning makes sense. No more bureaucratic nightmare and idiotic homework. Now we watch Ted Talks on space, have a favorite astronomer (yeah, weird, but cool) like Phil Plait, dabble in math, visit Facebook pages for schoolers and unschoolers, attend recreation gatherings during the day sometimes, and school in our pjs. In my head, I still run through the list of standards mentally checking them off, but when I see my kid coding for a course taken in the comfort of our home at age 9 and hanging out with homeschoolers and traditional schoolers alike (all without the daily frustrations of year’s past), it’s totally worth it.
As someone who still loves the classroom (in more of a self-directed/teacher supported style), I’d still go back if/when it all implodes. Education needs a major overhaul and here’s to hoping that homeschooling, unschooling, hackschooling, democratic schooling, natural schooling, & alternative schooling can all be choices in the near future for everyone. Thanks for enlightening your minions, Luther.
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