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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2909 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 7, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Homeschooling?

Were you homeschooled or are you homeschooling your children? Why / How are the outcomes?

Any opinions on specific curriculums

We're concerned with the progress of our 4th grader. We've had several conversations with the school, and a SPED eval, all scores average or above. Our school / district is in the top decile of our state.

My wife has Ph.D, and is currently SAHM. She would prefer a more classical / Latin curriculum.

I'm not keen on our schools curriculum, though I'm also not sure it matters that much. I do think the social interaction in school is important. My preference would be for more copy work, cursive instruction, and traditional literature, this doesn't seem to be on offer in public schools anymore.

I have close experience with several children who were homeschooled for a while and it did not go well, mainly because the homeschool teachers in these cases weren't on top of things. If your wife (whom I presume would be the teacher) is conscientious and organized then the academic curriculum should be easy going. As far as the curriculum, don't choose one that requires children stay "at grade level", where "grade level" is a one-size-fits-none affair.

For my own kid, I considered homeschooling them as a way to preserve their enthusiasm for learning. They can move at their own pace and learn things that are interesting to them. We haven't homeschooled (yet) mainly because their current school is really great at tailoring the curriculum to be interesting and challenging for each child. Also, there's no conscientious parent to be the teacher.

I do think the social interaction in school is important.

I am on the fence as far as whether the social interaction kids get in school is useful. School is kind of like prison, in that you're thrown in with people you don't necessarily like and you can't leave. Real life is very different; you can usually curate your social environment much more. The things you can get away with in school would get you booted (or dropped) from most social environments as an adult. And you're not necessarily learning how to be valuable, just how not to get expelled.

We're homeschooling our son, because Russian special ed schools suck and are full of asbo kids regular schools got rid of. It was perversely liberating to drop out of the educational rat race and concentrate on the 3 R's as the ultimate goal.

What's your solution for socialization?

We go to a private special ed non-profit a couple times per week for this.

I do think the social interaction in school is important.

As someone that was homeschooled in a rural area, I'm comfortable saying that this part is easily resolved with a bit of assistance from parents in making sure there are opportunities to get together with other kids. For me, this often meant playing pickup basketball, which then led to other friendships off the court. For what it's worth, I am not aware of any meaningful deficiencies that resulted from being homeschooled - I always had good friends, started dating at a normal age, and had no trouble continuing to have close friends and romantic success. The only thing that I ever really felt bitter about was that the local school district wouldn't allow me to join the teams there, for what always seemed more like spite at my parents for pulling me out of school than any legitimate rationale.

My kid is 9 and has been homeschooled the whole time. She is far ahead of grade 4 (she just finished gr 8 math, but math is pretty a priori, so it's easier to push than history or something) and she isn't that much weirder than the other kids. I'm not even sure her weirdness is from homeschooling- it might just be hereditary. I am a public highschool teacher, and quite apart from the low-balled curriculm and culture war stuff, just talking to other teachers is enough to make me prefer death in the street to sending my kid to school, at least until 10th grade (I'll consider it then).

Social interaction is absolutely the biggest problem. We live in Canada, in the reddest part of the country (although blue is the colour of the red tribe here, and red is the colour of the blue tribe), so there is no shortage of homeschooling families but they are a)weird as hell and b)hyper individualists who prefer to opt out rather than to work within a system. I don't blame them, that's why we homeschool too, but the result is that the slightest disagreement over vaccines, or theology, or which video games kids are allowed to play, leads to ghosting. These are people who REALLY fear that their kids will develop the wrong values, so they try to find people with perfectly matched values. This works great for Mormons, but not for anyone else.

The next part of the problem is that virtually all social interaction is mediated by mothers and determined by their relationships to each other. Just dropping your kid off at their friend's house is pretty rare. If the kids are hanging out, the moms are hanging out too, so the moms have to be friends. Sometimes they form Mom Groups. Often these groups become Machiavellian dens of intrigue and betrayal, and now your kid's friend just doesn't exist anymore. If you try to organize stuff yourself, it freaks out the moms.

So maybe you sign your kid up for soccer or swimming or something so they can make friends there with some normal kids. The problem is that no other parents thinks of these places as incubators of friendship- that's what school is for. So if you suggest that your kids hang out together sometime, people act like you just invited them to a threesome.

Now, my kid has like 4 friends, and I went to school and had like 4 friends too, so maybe she's not missing out, but maybe she is. I tell myself that it's a tradeoff- you can't count on getting a liberal arts education at university anymore, and you shouldn't try anyway because of the costs, so this way I can give her something like that between ages 12-17, and then she can go get technical training and in any case, who still talks to their elementary school friends?

So if you're opening yourself up to "You kept me isolated throughout my entire childhood," you want to be able to say "No I didn't but also, look at the education you received."

Math is easy. Push Khan Academy. My kid starts Algebra 1 next month, and she's 9. That's not prodigious, but it's pretty good. She'll understand it at least as well as the average kid in Algebra 1. I pushed her pretty hard, pretty young, which led to a lot of rage from me and I don't recommend it and I wont do it with my other kid. Eventually I figured out that as long as her age matches the grade level (9 years old = grade 9 math) everything works okay. If we creep beyond that (because you can advance through this stuff really fast when you aren't doing a crossword about fractions every Friday) she muddles through but it's just not worth it. This takes about 45 minutes per day.

Reading is easy. Teach your kid to read early. My one kid could read by 3, the other one is taking a little longer, but will be semi-fluent by 4. This literally adds years to the kid's info-absorbing life and boosts vocab hugely. This isn't just a party trick, since vocab limits comprehension of text. Push reading fiction to learn words and culture, and non-fiction to build a model of the world. Building an accurate model of the world is the most important way schools fail children. This takes about an hour per day.

Writing is less easy: Get the kid to write poetry and descriptive stuff, emulating the style of distinctive things they have read. There is a book called "Writing Power" by Adrienne Gear which has a lot of good tips for making a kid's writing suck less. This varies hugely. Writing about a trip to Disneyland takes 15 minutes, writing a 12-line poem can take an hour.

Science is easy: Science up to like grade 7 is just general knowledge. If the kid reads a lot, you're good. We follow our province's curriculum as a minimum standard, but it's stuff like "opposite poles attract, similar poles repel." Pretty simple stuff. We do this as the opportunity arises. Maybe an half an hour per day when we're doing it.

History is easy: History up to grade 12 is just bien-pensant propaganda. If your kid reads a lot, you're good. My kid is now at the age where we watch a lot of pop history videos, and we also read The Story of The World, which is a homeschooling classic and is a good starting point for building the model. We cover our province's curriculum in about 10 minutes every year just to be safe: "What happened to the Indians?" "Everyone was mean to them." "Was residential school a good thing?" "I'd say no." Done. This mostly is covered by reading time and conversations in the car.

Gym: BJJ and lots of swimming and biking. She has no idea what to do with a basketball or a baseball. I'd sign her up if she asked, though.

If your wife has a PhD, the above is probably all you need to do. We tried The Good and The Beautiful, which might be good for older kids, for for a small kid it was a lot of "Write 4 facts about Switzerland" and "Memorize this poem of dubious artistic merit that was clearly chosen for no other reason than its memorizability." It's made for stay-at-home essential-oil-selling moms with no real education of their own, and is pretty good for those situations. My wife sorta falls into that category so she gets my kid to do a lot of Duolingo and stuff like that, but I supervise most of the real work.

It's a ton of work. I help my kid with her math in the morning before I go to work and check her writing when I get home and ask her about the books she's reading and read classic stuff to her at night and show her the movies of cultural importance that she can understand. But when it goes well, the pride is indescribable, and we share enough of a common language that when she asks something like "What came before God" I can explain most of the debate pretty quickly in terms she can understand and she wails in frustration as she realizes that some things are not just unknown but unknowable because she really does understand the problem. This might happen if she went to a regular school, but the . . . intellectual(?-she's 9?) . . . relationship wouldn't be there, it would be- if it existed at all- between her and a childless 30-year-old wine-aunt teacher who obsessively watches The Bachelor. There's a fine line between "Why have kids if you're going to have someone else raise them?" and "I'll keep your body in the freezer so we'll never be apart," but I think all this effort and interaction and conflict leads to a better parent-child relationship, and I wouldn't want to cede that to an appointee of the state. Many parents have ceded that relationship with their kids to me without even knowing it ("I asked my mom about this stuff, but she doesn't know anything"), and I don't feel good about it.

I've heard good things about Writing with Ease, if your interested in expanding the writing instruction.

I am jealous of you even having this option, even though I harbor no hopes of being able to do it anywhere near as well. Maybe I'll need to emigrate to Austria or some other place that doesn't outright ban homeschooling, after all. No idea whether the daughter would be fit for it, though.

What did you do with your two-year-old?

She's 3. We're working on reading one day at time. You can't do anything really until the kid can read.

One thing I'm curious about is if you ever have trouble getting your child to listen to you and follow through on the work. My son lives in mortal fear of disappointing his teacher, which serves us well, but I feel like I would end up in a constant battle of wills if I was teaching him. Just trying to get him to do extra practice on things at home is like pulling teeth.

There was a lot of enthusiasm at the start, then a period of much conflict from ages 7-8, and now we're out a more neutral "I'd better get this done," which I'm happy to accept.

My kid starts Algebra 1 next month, and she's 9. That's not prodigious, but it's pretty good.

It's not Von Neumann or Tao, but it's definitely child prodigy level. Recall that the state of California has treated "we can't really teach Algebra I to the top 13 year old math students" as if it's a serious proposition to debate and not just grossly unfit educators outing themselves.

I mean it seems fairly common although definitely above average for homeschooled kids I know.

I was homeschooled, from 2nd grade all the way through the end of high school. My siblings were homeschooled all the way. Basically here is why it started, as I understand it (secondhand obviously, since I was too young to remember it well):

  • During a parent-teacher meeting, my 1st grade teacher told my parents that I was reading at a 5th grade level. My parents were concerned that I would be bored and stop trying to learn, so they asked if the curriculum could be advanced some to keep me challenged. They were told no, the curriculum was fixed and it was what it was.

  • They enrolled me in the local Catholic school for the rest of 1st grade, and decided that wasn't to their liking either. Not sure why - they never told me, and I was never curious enough to ask. I would guess expense (farmers don't make much money), but not sure.

  • The next year they started homeschooling me, and my brother/sister as well (though at different grade levels, I'm 4 years older than my sister and 5 years older than my brother).

For all of us, through the 8th grade we were given books to self-study various subjects (math, English, social studies, and so on). My mom bought the books from Bob Jones University Press, and was pretty hands-off when teaching us. She was there for questions, but otherwise it was self-directed study. The books were... OK. They are fundamentalist Christians (Baptists specifically iirc), and that bias really came through strongly in the books at times. They were pretty openly anti-Catholic at times, and you best believe that the books had things to say on things like evolution being false. But apart from when the ideological bias got in the way, I recall the books being fairly decent.

Starting from 9th grade, I was enrolled in a correspondence course for high school (so that I would get an actual diploma and not have to take the GED, iirc). I was part of a program called Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools. The main difference for me was that for major assignments (essays, tests etc) I had to mail them in for someone at the physical school to grade them. There was some feedback from the teachers at the school IIRC, but not a whole lot. It was real impersonal. But I did OK (not great, due mostly to my own academic laziness than anything else). When they got to 9th grade, my brother and sister went through a similar program, but a different school providing it. They had a personal teacher assigned for all the years of high school, and she would work with them a lot more on areas she saw needed improvement when she graded their work. Still not the same as having an in-person teacher (naturally, this was like 2004-2005), but a lot more hands-on instruction than I got from HS.

Along the way my parents participated in various activities like area homeschool groups (where we would do things like take music lessons from a retired music teacher, for example), had us in 4-H, we were involved in church, and so on. That more or less covered the "teach the kids how to interact socially" aspect of school for us.

My brother, sister and I all wound up graduating with real actual HS diplomas, and my brother and I went on to college and both did well (admittedly: my laziness meant I did poorly in my early 20s, but finished in my late 20s and did very well). My sister did not go to college but she was really, really not cut out for it so that's not really that surprising. We are all relatively well-adjusted adults, or at least I'm unconvinced our flaws are due to our school situation. So, it went OK.

All that said... there were downsides I feel. The big one is like I said, my mom was very hands-off as a teacher. This got worse as we got older, because Mom started to have physical problems that kept her in pain a lot of the time. Some days she would take meds for her medical condition that just put her straight to sleep, and she'd be that way most of the day. For my brother and me, that was actually OK. We're bright, and while we fucked around a lot (as kids will) we would eventually do our work. For my sister... not so much I think. She has severe dyslexia, and I think she really could've benefited from a teacher who a) was more hands-on, and b) had more training/experience dealing with kids who had learning disabilities. I need to stress my sister is not stupid, she's actually very smart and continues to do self-directed learning to this day (on topics she finds interesting). But she really struggled hard in school, and while I can't prove it I think it didn't have to be as hard for her as it was.

Second, while my parents made efforts to socialize us I personally (can't speak for my brother or sister) had issues learning that stuff as easily as it seemed like my peers did. I was always, always the odd kid out until I was decently into my teenage years. Some of that is because kids are mean and single out anyone who is different (I got flack for having big ears in 1st grade for example), but some of it I do feel is due to how I was socialized relative to a lot of my peers. Eventually I learned, of course. Nowadays I have no trouble socializing compared to anyone else. But it took a while to get there, and there were a lot of times (even as late as being 16-17 years old) where I would commit a faux pas that I honestly had no idea was problematic. So I think that part of my education didn't go as well as it could have. My brother seems to have done OK in that regard, and my sister... she's just a really eccentric person and always has been. I don't think anything would have helped her with that (if anything, public school might have made her a huge bully target).

So, do I have regrets? Not really, no. I made it to adulthood fine and I don't think I'm (at this point at least) any worse off for it. My brother the same (imo), and my sister probably came out somewhat worse for it (though it's debatable, as I feel she definitely would've been a bully magnet in the school system). So overall, not a horrible track record. But if I were in my parents' shoes, I'd do a couple of things differently. First, be more active in the kids' education than my mom was. I really think it wasn't a great showing from her even if it worked out OK. Second, when one of my kids showed signs that maybe they had unique challenges I wasn't equipped to deal with, consider looking at more traditional schooling options where they can get their needs met better. Knowing my parents, I doubt that was ever on the table for my sister.

Whether or not I would homeschool my kids (I don't have any) is tougher. I think public schools today are honestly kind of fucked in a lot of ways. I would be absolutely horrified if my kid came home with their teacher or peers teaching them about how they were non-binary or transgender or something (just one example, but a hot button topic these days). So I feel like if I wanted my kids to grow up with good values and culture, I would have to do something to change their peer group and who was teaching them. IDK if that would be homeschooling, or a private school, or what. But I would at least consider homeschooling to be an option on the table for my own hypothetical kids.

I've always found myself rather confused by the uniquely American obsession with homeschooling.

Without getting into the Culture War aspect of it, in most of the places I've been, the very idea would warrant confusion and raised eyebrows. At the least, people would assume you had way too much time on your hands if you could afford to tutor your kids in that manner.

India has pretty poor schooling, even at prestigious institutions like the one I went to. You see, the teachers at schools know really well that the majority of students are going to be receiving private tutoring outside the school, and thus don't really teach rigorously enough to do a good job at covering the syllabus; leaving aside the very large class sizes. This paradoxically only increases the need for private tutoring, since parents know their kids ain't learning shit at school.

When I speak of private tutoring, we have both 1:1 coaching, as well as academies that offer larger lectures. The former is still quite affordable to the middle and upper end of the middle class, and the latter is quite cheap all considered.

Honestly, a lot of people go to sham schools that don't actually teach or take attendance, using that time to go study at those places for far more personalized and thorough instruction.

(In hindsight, my then undiagnosed ADHD would have made me do much worse if I didn't have a tutor watching me like a hawk, so I'm grateful for that much!)

How long was your school day in India? Ours is ~7:40 - 15:40. Including the bus ride to/from school. Were we to add tutors, that would eat into unstructured time that I think is important. When my wife was in school in Germany it was only a half day, but with a much heavier homework load than our children have. Even my elementary school in the mid-80's in California had much more assigned homework.

If I had to include the bus ride for my school it was 7 am to 3 pm. You could shave off maybe an hour if your school wasn't as far as mine.

And sadly, a child's free time is the first of many casualties when it comes to running the academic rat race. I had at least 1 hour of tuition a day till high school, when it became common to attend 2 to 3 hours on top of regular schooling most days a week.

Not as bad as Korea or China, but same energy really.

India also has, by Western standards, a very strong culture/very strong cultures and family structures. North America has basically no traditional culture at all and is extremely socially atomized, which makes school the chief influence on kids after Tiktok. So if you care about transmission of cultural values, public schools are unattractive and will in many cases actively work to subvert the values of the families whom teachers consider their culture war enemies. I am a teacher, and I see it every week, if not every day. Add to this the fact that schools in North America are expected to teach nearly nothing, and fail even at that, and homeschooling starts to look okay.

I was homeschooled through seventh grade by my stay-at-home mother. My memories of my homeschooling experience grow increasingly hazy with distance, but IIRC I just docilely worked through the workbooks that my mother told me to work through*, and read a lot of library books on the side. In public middle school and high school, I achieved grades sufficient for two colleges to offer full-tuition scholarships. I have a job that pays reasonably well.

*Exception: I wasn't interested in the Spanish workbooks that she bought for me, and instead (intrigued by all the species names listed in Encarta) I insisted on learning Latin—mostly by translating texts from English into Latin with dictionaries (1 2) and consulting the grammar information in a workbook, rather than the usual method of actually working through the workbook and translating texts from Latin to English. I can't say that I achieved fluency, but I did acquire enough knowledge to skip to the third-year Latin class in high school, after being forced to take a year of Spanish anyway in eighth grade.

My younger brother was homeschooled through sixth grade. Again, my memories are hazy at this point, but I think my mother had to take a much more hands-on approach with him, actually guiding him through the workbooks rather than just leaving him to do them himself. As far as I am aware, he did merely okay in public school and college (community college, after flunking out of West Point), but he, too, now has a job that pays reasonably well.

I have extremely blurry memories of one or two homeschooling groups and churches that my mother may have occasionally joined (my family was at least a little religious at some point, but dropped religion early on), but I don't think we participated much in such things. I have bad social skills and zero friends. My brother appears to have good social skills and several friends.

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