Persecuted Germans find political asylum in the US

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The historical record is full of accomplished individuals who are self-taught - Ben Franklin was largely self-taught and one of the most accomplished men in history (although he had some formal education at an early age). I suspect that the results reflected self-motivated students, who may have had help from professional tutors, but still may be largely self-taught. we don't know what part, or portion parents played in the transfer of knowledge. Ben had a very systematic and formalized process for his own education, which in itself was quite extraordinary.

Nevertheless, there are no real concrete studies on what is going on in homeschooling except by self-interested parties and advocates. It appears, from what I could discover, that many who went on to college still had to get their formal GEDs, and I don't know the process for every instance: Did they just take the test and pass on first try? Did they require GED classes or special tutoring? College admissions are still what they are, which means that there are different standards at different colleges and univeristies, but all of them seem to require a HS education or a GED of some kind, along with the normal SATs.

It's no secret that American students test low on English, math and history scores. To say that homeschooled students do just as well, is not really saying much. My defense of education is for the process: The idea of a systematic and formal process which demonstrates a particular level of excellence. An individual should be able to demonstrate that he/she has done the actual work in an area of study. I've been harping on standards, which in my opinion are way too low, and those I don't defend.

Because of the politics of education we hold our teachers to high standards. They complete a formal process of learning, become specialized in the craft of teaching, and we make them pass the competency tests. Every politician harps on holding teachers to a high standard. Then once they get in the classroom we lower the standards for students and force teachers to become nothing more than glorified babysitters to the point that know-nothing parents and armchair "teachers" can claim they can do the same or better. What sense does that make?

 

Chandos, if you guys don't have standards there, that's no one's fault but your own (the state, not yours personally). Here, we do have standards, in all those fields. I say I can teach them because I know them. Math and physics I actually have a graduate degree to support me. Computer science, too (at least for the HS stuff). English I say I can do because I still remember how to disect a sentence, formal grammar, and other things. History, government, and PE, I know enough to know what I don't know, and to know that I could easily find it online or in a public library if I wanted to.

From your response to TGS I can only assume you didn't actually read the link. I would suggest you do so. Yes, it is an interested party, but it is also a very comprehensive study, and until someone contradicts it with their own study, I see little reason to doubt it. Furthermore, it didn't just say that homeschooled children did as well as public schooled children, but noticably better, on average.

 

Being good at the subjects yourself only goes so far. Teaching is a craft in itself. Based on what you wrote, I only believe you qualified to teach math and physics - if you also have some teacher training. There's a reason why at high school level, one person typically teaches only one or two subjects.

 

Bad assumption. I did read the link and explored BEYOND the link to discover that it is a self-interested party and an advocate of homeschooling. That in itself may or may not mean much, but it is written by a "media director." But I could not find enough details on the data that the media director for the company in question posted. It wanted to find some independent results but there is little published data on the subject. I thought that rather odd.

Good. You should do that BEFORE you take your teacher competency test. Writing on the test that you will learn this in the future won't help you much. The standards are there for a reason, to see if you can already teach the subjects.

That is in elementary school. In HS they are working with particular texts. In Texas it is much harder to teach English,even with the teacher certification program, without taking the specific programs in English at the upper levels.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with that. I had a formal training in teaching and let me tell you that it is one thing to learn about a subject but it is a totally different matter to learn how to teach that subject.

I also agree with Chandos that teaching a language goes well beyond basics like grammar and syntax.

Furthermore having been homeschooled for two years (from 14 to 16) because I couldn't go to school I know how hard it is even for a good student. If you're good there are many things you can learn on your own but for other things you can't replace a real teacher.

 

Exactly. What happens to the rest of the frog? It can't just disappear somewhere, and I doubt it's worth much.

 

We don't eat this stuff on a regular basis. Besides not all frogs are edible. I must confess that when I have a steak I don't care to find out where the leather, the horns and the hooves go.

 

As I said earlier, I've been told I'm a good teacher.

Actually, you didn't have to look beyond the link to find that. It was stated in the second paragraph of the link. I'll trust that you actually read it, though.

Unfortunately, that's the way these things tend to go. The people that want to defend something actually do research to prove their point, but of course they're biased. Meanwhile, the people that want to attack it just hollar doubts. We ran into this with Taser, too.

Yeah, that's stuff I'd look up if and when I decided to home-school. Incidentally, I'm not sure we communicated this properly, but as I understand it most states have standards for the students to meet, but not the parents. If the student passes X test, it's fine, but the parent is on their own.

I don't know what you did in HS English, but all we did was reading comprehension, 'creative' writing, and exposure to classics. There wasn't any technical stuff done those years. Even iambic pentameter was covered in Middle School.

 

I can't say. But I'll trust you on that. Ultimately it is your students who determine that.

There is "research," and then there is research. As I commented, I went beyond the link to discover what KIND of research was being done on homeschooling and who was doing it.

They were vastly different for me. They were almost identical to the basic classes in college for non-English majors.

 

I've been told that I'm a good cook, that doesn't make me a professional cook.

 

Anyone can be a good teacher.

At first.

Then the novelty wears off.

I've only helped teach maths to Year 2 (age 6 and 7) when I wasn't allowed to join my year of school halfway through a term (we had to move house under special circumstances)

The chlidren loved it, someone closer to their age explaining things in a different way to their usual teacher, doing different excersizes, would help students one at a time if I had to. Moved the average grade up two levels as well.

Then I was told to do paperwork instead () the teacher went back with my notes, my excersizes, tried to emulate the lesson plans I had and the children went back to being bored and slipping again.

Was I a good teacher? Perhaps. The only way to find out for certain is to teach for years, and I wouldn't want to put my own child through that test period and risk ruining their education by finding out "Y'know, the ones who've studied this and made it their lifes work may have a point"

 

But what did you find when you looked? So far, all you've said is you didn't find a lot of details and you couldn't find any independant research.

... Yeah, umm, same here, sadly. The teacher for Scientific and Technical Writing said I should have taken the clep test and skipped the class. I think it's because I actually knew how to think logically (as opposed to most of the other students in the class, sadly).

 

I'm not sure how you are responding to my post with this rant. My point was that hardly anything in your post about your HS classes was like my experience in HS. Now you are saying something different? I'm not sure what you are saying here. Unless, you mean that your basic classes in college were like my HS school English classes? In that case it was not, since in HS there was no "scientific writing," nor was there for non-English majors at my college. No one was required to take Sceintific writing, unless, I guess, they were in a science program. So I guess it was different in both cases then.

All writing, in some sense, is about "thinking logically," except maybe creative writing, which conforms to its own internal logic. More advanced writing in English is mostly about sharpening rhetorical skills, which is why an English degree is considered to be a pre-law degree as well. All we had to do was take the LSAT to enter law school.

 

I was saying that my college and my high-school were about on par for English, and apparently nothing like yours at all. The 'scientific and technical writing' class was basically: think and write at the same time, and it was the most advanced english I had in college. The other class I had was basically: read this, now read this, this is a famous piece, read it, too.

 

...and I got dissed in another thread for saying basically the same thing.

 

OK, I got it now, NOG.

My classes were different. They went: Lecture on a text, read it, do the research; think about how the research compares with your reading of the text; then write an essay, in a formal manner, about the work in question. Often, the topics within the text were provided by the instructor.

The first year, there were two semesters of the above: Comp and Rhetoric, which just about everyone had to take (including English majors). In the second year, non-english majors could take just about anything offered to 2nd year students to complete the English requirements (4 classes total for both years), but they typically took the easy classes, like "The Novel," or "The Play," these were very much like my HS school English classes; English majors had to work off the required list for the program and certain classes were closed to them because they were for non-English majors. In my second year I was still a journalism major, but I took 4 English classes that year: 2 semesters of English Literature and 2 semesters of world lit. When I switched to English, I had to go back and take 2 semesters of American lit, because the world lit was not required for English majors, but American was (but that still gave me 2 classes towards my English electives, so it worked out).

So with that out of the way, how would you approach teaching HS English in the homeschooling scenario? Which model would you use? or maybe a combination of both. While there are still lesson plans and outlines that you can purchase online, you still have to choose. And where do you start? With Homer, or Beowulf, or the Mayflower Compact? If your child is not an English major, these are hard choices, because you want to spend quality time on texts that matter. However, if your child was an English major (which would be rare), you probably start at the beginning and do all the above at some point.

DMC - You posted while I was writing this post, which I kept starting and stopping on. I had one prof, exactly like you describe for an upper-level English class, and I immediately dropped the class after her first lecture and looking over the reading list. She even wore a regular man's three piece suit for the lecture and from the back, you would think she was a dude. I was not about to waste my time on her, when there were plenty of other instructors I could learn from. I had another one in a Sociology class, which I tolerated for a week and then dropped the class, for a much better instuctor. Those were the only two I had like that. I had another Marxist-feminist-lesbian for a literary studies class, who was an absolute sweetheart and tolerated my constant challenges to her views and she was a gem about it. She even gave me an A for the class, despite me once saying in her classroom that her views on literature were "idiotic." She claimed that Shakespeare was the most overrated writer in literature. I later apologized to her for the comment, and thanked her for being so patient with me. She was very gracious about it. But I want to stress that I was normally not that disrespectful to anyone in my academic career.

 

Wow, Chandos, you were lucky. We got one opportunity to write anything about what we read, and that was about how The Red Wheelbarrow (a short poem) made us feel.

As for teaching english, for a rough, first-blush overview, this is what I'd do:
Elementary: writing, reading, vocabulary, beginnings of grammar, creative writing later on.
Middle: reading comprehension, creative and critical writing, advanced grammar, more vocabulary, some classics (probably all fiction).
High: more classics (various sorts: history, journals, biographies, legal documents, fictions, satyrs, etc), creative, critical, and research writing, with more focus on factual analysis and support, opinion essays and debate, tools of literature.
College: go to college

 

On a rather tangential point to this conversation ...


DMC, IIRC, Wharton *IS* a business school. To complain that it's "absurdly over-weighted towards business and finance" seems rather silly.

Wharton (IIRC) is a business school. It has a specific focus. Would you expect a law school to not be focused on law, or a technical school, like MIT, to be focused on technology?

It seems silly to complain about the focus. This is the sort of thing that you should know going in... And if one isn't interested in "business and finance", then one shouldn't be going to a university with that focus. It's not as if there aren't plenty of other perfectly good universities out there with other focuses or no focus at all.