FSM advocates call for equal time in science classrooms

[Langston]

Jesus was a carpenter... but he never seemed to be doing his job... he was always too busy hanging out in the fields with his friends.

If I was Joseph, I would have smacked him down and put his ass to work.

[Donnel]

laff

you aren't going to agree, I'm not going to convince you, so why don't we talk about something else?

[Zanchief]

fine~

[Donnel]

*crickets*

[Zanchief]

Wasn't it more fun when we were arguing?

[Narrock]

lol Zanchief sucks. Ok, your turn.

[Gidan]

I went to private schools from 5th grade to graduation, I can assure you that that private school kids are not the pure oh heart people that people associate with them. They are just as sexually active if not more so then public school kids.

[Gypsiyee]

Going to have to agree with Gidan

One of my friends had the whole religion thing going in her family her whole life - had to go to a Christian school, father was a preacher, etc

Around 16 she got sick of having to believe what her family did and what her school taught her so she turned into a turbo slut - now she's 22 with a baby that she pawns off on her parents and is going through a divorce

Granted this isn't the case with all people, but don't think it doesn't happen because they're 'raised with good values.'

[Eziekial]

High School turbo-sluts, what fond memories

[Tuggan]

I dated a catholic school girl, she used to rant and rave about how fucked up all the kids were. All girl school, all kinds of dirty, kinky, hot lesbian shit going on.

Nothing to do with values or how youre raised, its all part of growing up... experimentation. I cant believe how clueless or forgetful some of you older posters are. You were teenagers at one time too.

[veeneedefeesh]

Funny that homeschooling has come up. I decided to homeschool my kids this year.

If done properly, I see no reason why a child taught at home cannot function properly in college or work. I've known MANY homeschooled children (I worked at a library for 10 years) and for the most part they were the most well-behaved, bright kids to visit the library. They also were the kids with the most curious minds and love of researching new subjects. By contrast most of the kids in the public schools were disruptive and constantly kicked out of the library. They did the minimum required and rarely looked up stuff just for the fun of it. It's almost like the joy of learning was taken from them by the school system.

My neighbor is currently homeschooling her 5 kids and their house is one of the hubs of the neighborhood. They are highly active in MANY activities that allows them to interact with other kids and they aren't in the least socially backward.

My ex homeschooled my kids for a couple of years and here are some of the problems that I saw with it. Keep in mind that my ex is basically an oxygen thief who used the homeschooling for justification for sitting on her fat ass and not becoming a productive member of society, but I believe that in many cases even studious and responsible parents could fall into the same traps that she fell into. Perhaps by giving you this info you may be able to avoid these pitfalls, but it is definately something you need to watch out for.

1.) Very little interaction with other children
This is a biggie. my oldest is a very social kid she has no problem interacting with other kids ...when she sees other kids. But living in BFE made contact with other children very difficult at best. The second child is not so socially active and has become a total recluse who does not know how to deal with other children at all. The youngest is not school aged, but she frequently interupted the work and made it very difficult for the older two to stay focused on topic. The youngest still doent know how to "play nice" and we have problems with her being mean or disrespectful to other children. Even the oldest behaves very immaturely because she just doesnt know what is acceptable behavior for a girl her age. She doens't ahve any role models (even bad role models teach you how NOT to behave) Now you can enroll them in extra-curricular activities, but these are more social or sports related environments and don't teach the children about a "working environment" and what is acceptable within a structured setting.

2.) Not enough structure.
In traditional schools you wake up at a certain time to catch the bus, you are forced to dress to some sort of dress code (as opposed to doing school-work in a night-gown) arrive at school at a set time every day. you go to english class at a certain time every day, you go to math class at a certain time every day. projects must be completed within the alloted time span etc. This is probably more a fault of the teacher (sic) but school started at whatever time was convenient for my ex. (usually whenever she decided to drag her sorry ass out of bed) the children were allowed to keep working (or staring at a blank piece of paper) until the job was complete or until the "teacher" got fed up and bitched and moaned until they got to work. Some days they were done with school by 10AM some days they were still sitting at the table when dinner time rolled around at 6PM. What this does not teach (or rather is counter-productive) is that in the real world (even college) people expect you to arrive promptly and ready to work and that projects must be completed in a timely manner not "whenever it is done".

3.) there were little or no consequences for failure.
They were allowed to redo (often many times) work until it was done correctly. There were never any failing grades issued. On the surface this sounds good (they learn that projects must be completed properly) but the reality was the children never learned that doing sub-par work was unacceptable and had negative consequences other than having to redo ad nauseum until it was done right. As a parent you naturally don't want ot see your children fail so the natural response is to either overlook some shortcomings or to make them redo a project until they do well. This is not good, they need an objective person to grade their work. Some of the best lessons I ever learned I learned from failure. you learn that failure is bad and to be more conscious of your work and the quality thereof.

4.) did I mention lack of socialization?
If you are going to to home school then you better prepare to enroll them in some sort of extra-curricular activities at least 3-4 days a week. Now this wasn't an issue for my ex, she just ignored this aspect of their development completely, but I have a cousin who has 4 daughters and they enroll them in a dozen extra-curricular activities each so I have seen some of the problems associated with this. If your children have differing interests it can be a real problem, because one will have dance class on one side of town and another will have swimming lessons on the other side of town and they have to be at recitals and track meets on the same day, sometimes not even in the same town. What my cousins have to do is the father goes in one direction and the mother goes in the other. Both kids meet their obligations, but dad never gets to see the swim meets and the mom never gets to see band recitals.

5.) The "teacher" has to put in about twice to three times the amount of work than the children had to perform.
Remember you have to prepare "class" every day, you have to gather materials (this gets expensive quick, you have the normal books and pencils etc that all kids need, but you also have to buy or download and print worksheets, study materials, etc. lots of hidden cost) All this takes time. Then you have to grade their work, you have to explain their errors to them, you have to file and keep up with grades and many other time consuming (although rewarding) tasks. If you dont have 8-12 hours a day (in addition to the 6 hours that you are actually "teaching") you probably arent going to be able to provide a complete curriculum. This is accomlished in traditional schools by the fact that the curriculum is pretty much the same every year for each grade and the teachers have many years to prepare and perfect the curriculum, and they have the support of other teachers who have taught the same lessons previously. As a home school parent you don't have that luxury. You have a new curriculum to prepare every year and you don't have several years to perfect it.

6.) Children don't listen to their parents.
I am sure you have noticed how much better your children behave at other people's houses than at your own. This is natural, all kids do it to one degree or another. There is the tendancy for children to think their parents havent got sense enough to blow their own noses, must less actually know what the hell they are talking about. I don't agree with this misconception, but I recognize that it exists. Also going back to something I mentioned earlier you won't have a support system of other adults to discuss issues you are having with your children. It is not uncommon for parents to "just not understand" why their children do what they do (or not as the case may be) You aren't perfect you won't be able to relate completely to your children, their experiences, and their attitudes and behaviors/actions

Now in all fairness I must admit that my children were learning material that was much more advanced than what the public schools were teaching children their age, but in the long run I did not feel like the benefits outweighed the detriments. Sure they know more about greek mythology and world history than I was taught in schools, and they weren't force-fed bullshit, (although don't under-estimate the benefit of opposing views and information that you as a parent are not aware of or don't agree with.) and we had more control over what they were taught than if they were put into a traditional school, but when you consider how much their development was stunted by the above problems I felt that they were better off in a traditional school. I finally (after two years of battling and finally asking for a divorce to put her into a posiiton where she had to get off her ass and just didnt have time to invest in home school) put my foot down and forced my ex to send them back to a traditional school.

As a loving parent you of course want to shield your children from the evils of the world, but you aren't doing them any favors by doing so. The real world (tm) isn't a pretty place and the sooner they learn to cope with that, the better off they are. Now I am not in any way advocating tossing them into the fire unprepared, but let them get into trouble occasionally, let them meet "the bad kids", let them learn that some people can't be trusted, let them learn that some people are just assholes and you still have a job to do regardless of how much of a jerk your supriors are, let them make their own mistakes, they will be better adults for it in the long run.

You probably won't change your mind about homeschooling because of my diatribe, but please for the sake of your children don't make the same mistakes that my ex made, and don't home school for more than a year or two at a time. Hopefully you arent a waste of genetic material that my ex was, but as I said I believe that these pitfalls exist regardless and you need to be aware of them so that you can try to avoid them.
My ex was also home schooled and I truly believe that this was a major contributing factor to her never finishing anything and never being able to exist in a structured environment like the fact that in 14 years she was completely unable to hold a job for more than 6 months at a time, or the fact that while she passed several classes in college, she never had a passing semester because she just never followed thru on anything and unless it was a super interesting class she lost interest and never finished.

Good luck you are in for a long day if you want to do a decent job of educating your children yourself!

[Martrae]

Thanx Veenee, I don't expect it to be easy.

Did your wife ever get them into programs like 4h, swim lessons, sports? Did she use a full-fledged curriculum or did she hobble stuff together?

[Zanchief]

There are advantages, though. You can learn so much more from home schooling. To be honest I can name like 6 things I've learned from my 15 years of schooling. There's so little material to cover in the curriculum, plus you just go over the same stuff the next year. As long as you make an effort to keep the kid around people his own age as much as possible, I'd see a pretty big benefit to it.

[Gidan]

How far do you intend to home school? I know I would certainly not be able to home school my child through a large portion, especially when it comes to Literature and things like that. I did have a few friends whos parents were attempting to home school them even though they didn't have even the most basic grasp of math past Algebra and they ended up having to goto friends when they actually needed to use what their parents attempted to teach them.

For a parent who really has a firm crasp of what needs to be taught and has the ability to actually teach it; home schooling can get great. For parents who think they have that ability and knowlege but actually dont, it can turn into a disaster and really hurt the child in the long run.

Alot of people really underestimate how much children actually learn in school. Sure you can look back and say I didn't learn anything, however there is so much that your learned that you completely take for granted. I am willing to bet every person on this board learned alot in the time they spent in school that you dont even realize you know or that you dont attribute to learning in school.

There's so little material to cover in the curriculum, plus you just go over the same stuff the next year

I think this is actually a misunderstanding in teaching. There is actually a very large curriculum (My roomate after college was a teacher, trust me the curriculum is huge). Second when you go over the "same stuff" next year, thats only partially what your doing. Yes you are going back over it, repeating something over and over is the best way to learn it, also every time its repeated from year to year, its expanded upon. You may hear the same thing in 9th grade that you heard in 12th grade but your going to hear it in a different way usually with more detail or the expectation of greater understanding on the students part.

[Martrae]

I'm not really sure how far I'll take it. The idea in the back of my head is to maybe teach them at home until 6thish (I totally made that up!) and then see about enrolling them in a private school.

I figure my 10 years of helping kids with homework assignments and doing research will give me a pretty good foundation for the academic part. And I consider myself to be a pretty intelligent, rational person.

Social interaction shouldn't be a problem. Just on my little street alone there are 19 kids and that doesn't include friends that visit and grandchildren that might as well live in the area. I also plan on getting them into organized stuff like scouts and sports. I'll have to make a little more effort since I won't be connected to the schools where they pass that information out, but I don't see that as a reason to chuck the whole thing.

[The Kizzy]

There are some upsides to homeschooling. I pasted an article about it a long tim eago. I think it was this website. I will have to see if I can find it again.

[10sun]

I think a major problem with today's public schools is the lack of segregation between intelligence levels.

That and there are major problems with funding levels being disparate based simply upon proximity to major businesses.

-Adam

[Harrison]

I think a major problem with today's public schools is the lack of segregation between intelligence levels.

That is THE major problem.

Holding the rest of us back because no one wants to offend the rich selectman's daughter is insulting and WRONG.

Personal example given out of anger

[Jennay]

I think homeschooling is a great idea so long as you're doing it for the right reasons and you keep encouraging social interaction. You can't avoid the bad things though, such as teasing. That's going to happen no matter where they are. You can avoid the cliques and earliest suggestion of grouping people according to class and crete though, to a degree I would think. That itself would make homeschooling worth it. Imagine if you weren't judged by if you wore brand name clothes, or if your hair looked good, or if you were poor. It's truly sickening how some kids pick up stuff like that from their parents and get so stuck up on themselves that they start comparing their good fortune with your parents' and your family. It would have saved many people from having such low self esteem early on.

Also, your kid wouldn't have to be put on hold so that the hyperactive kid with A.D.D. in the back of the class, the trouble maker and class clown, the kid who can't sit still and insists on talking and throwing things can be told to shut the fuck up for the 10th time so everyone else can learn.

[Gidan]

I think homeschooling is a great idea so long as you're doing it for the right reasons and you keep encouraging social interaction. You can't avoid the bad things though, such as teasing. That's going to happen no matter where they are. You can avoid the cliques and earliest suggestion of grouping people according to class and crete though, to a degree I would think. That itself would make homeschooling worth it. Imagine if you weren't judged by if you wore brand name clothes, or if your hair looked good, or if you were poor. It's truly sickening how some kids pick up stuff like that from their parents and get so stuck up on themselves that they start comparing their good fortune with your parents' and your family. It would have saved many people from having such low self esteem early on.

Also, your kid wouldn't have to be put on hold so that the hyperactive kid with A.D.D. in the back of the class, the trouble maker and class clown, the kid who can't sit still and insists on talking and throwing things can be told to shut the fuck up for the 10th time so everyone else can learn.

Home schooling isn't going to avoid the cliques that are associated with school. Even though the child may not get that interaction in school, cliques are apart of society in areas. The only way for a child to truly avoid cliques's is to not have contact with anyone. Rmember cliques's do not end when you leave school. They are a apparent in all ages and in all areas of society. Think of the people you work with and I bet you can pick out the cliques. It could even be argues that denying a child the chance to experience cliques in school is actually hindering their future.

[Martrae]

Yes, my children will be stunted because they will never truly experience not being one of the 'in' crowd while growing up.

[Gidan]

The "in" crowd doesn't end in school you know. Also there is more then just the "in" crowed when you talk about school systems.

[Trielelvan]

You know, it's not like Mart's kids HAVEN'T been in public school already... or am I wrong? She is choosing to homeschool them now, but has not in the past, so they have had a chance to see some of the things some of you are concerned about, yes?

Personally Mart, I say go for it with gusto.
It's up to the parents, who know more about their childrens' personalities, to say whether or not homeschooling would help or hinder them. Also, Mart is pretty damned intelligent and responsible - I think she is perfectly capable of making a good judgement call on her own kids, and will be able to see whether or not it's going to work out for them... but she'll never know until she tries, will she?

Several of my previous co-workers were homeschooling their kids, and they were some of the happiest, well adjusted kids I ever met (when some were put back in public highschool, "peer pressure" to them was not only laughable, but outright stupid - they adjusted just fine).
I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that they were seeing firsthand how MUCH their parents were willing to invest both timewise and effortwise in their futures?

[Gidan]

My feelings toward homschool having nothing to do with Mart's decision. If she has thought through her decision in every way and believes it is whats beter for her children, then I say go for it. Like you said, they are he childrena nd she knows tehm beter then anyone.

[kaharthemad]

I think a major problem with today's public schools is the lack of segregation between intelligence levels.

Amen Adam

I spent 4 teacher conferences with my Daughters teacher telling me that she lacks attention. And that she is bored.

My main conjecture was that if she is bored perhaps there is a reason why..

Her teacher brought up that she could not count past 50. I knew that was BS since she did it for me. I found out the reason for this is she was standing her up in front of the class to count. Hell I could never preform like that either.

The conversation then went back to her not paying attention. I asked "is she doing the work you gave her?"
"yes"
"Is it right?"
"yes"
"Then you have found the problem. It is you"