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Homeschooling hits record numbers

(reason.com)
193 points bilsbie | 1 comments | 21 Nov 25 00:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.227s | source
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jmathai ◴[21 Nov 25 01:56 UTC] No.46000348[source]▶
I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.

We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.

We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.

But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.

That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.

Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.

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AnimalMuppet ◴[21 Nov 25 02:18 UTC] No.46000487[source]▶
One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.

Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.

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1. kevstev ◴[21 Nov 25 22:18 UTC] No.46009678[source]▶
That's also 4 entirely different curriculums which need to be taught. I volunteer taught CS for about 10 years, and the first year I taught a new class- and this was a single class for high school kids- I always found I was much better at it the second and third time around. I taught about 4 different courses, of varying difficulty- intro to programming with SNAP, "CS Principles" which had a little bit of everything from (very) basic networking to html and a bit of javascript, Javascript/Python, and then the final boss... AP CS in Java, which is a very difficult class.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.

Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.

For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.