Home schooling in CA

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by scaeagles

I don't understand all the methodology stuff with teaching. Seriously. Some trained teacher is supposed to understand better than I do how my child learns the best when I've been raising my child and to the teacher my kid is just one of 25-30 kids who may learn in a completeyl different fashion.

A good teacher, absolutely. Would you say the same of doctors?

By most accounts, I'm a math genius. I knew more about calculus than my calculus teacher did before I began taking the class. And yet I have tried countless times to tutor people on basic algebra...and have failed miserably. I am a terrible teacher, I don't understand it at all. It's a skilled occupation. No amount of restating it until they get it has ever done me any good. I simply do not possess the skill of passing my knowledge on.

Traci - would your parents have made good homeschool parents? Nevermind, I think know the answer to that based on what you've said about your family. Odds are, many of the same qualities that would have made them poor homeschool teachers are the same that lead you to feel unserved by your education. There is a HUGE misconception that the goal of public education is to dump your kids and have them magically absorb knowledge. The reality is that any education system can do no more nor less than provide a framework in which to learn. Success relies on active (and productive) participation by the student in the learning process and by the parent in the student's learning process. I'm sure Traci and Wendy and others are in a better position to confirm this, but my suspicion is that a good chunk the homeschool community are people with parents that didn't do much to reinforce good learning while they were in public school and therefore have a bad impression of it.

And Wendy, like I said before, no one is arguing that there isn't a place for homeschooling. At least, I'm not. No system can fit everyone's needs and homeschooling is absolutely the right choice for some. All I'm saying is that not allowing for some level of accountability is not a workable option. While it may be true that the majority of the 200,000 homeschool students are doing just fine, even a small percentage of 200,000 is too many kids getting left behind (to coin a phrase) or worse as in the case that lead to this ruling.