Re: [seul-edu] Home schooling question

["Dave Prentice" <prentice@instruction.com>]

Guys,
    I am a classroom teacher who is all for home schooling. However, I
think the seul-edu list is supposed to be focused on Linux. This
thread might be better placed on school-discuss.
Dave Prentice
prentice@instruction.com
http://www.originsresource.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Don Christensen <djc@cisco.com>
To: seul-edu@seul.org <seul-edu@seul.org>
Cc: Brm0411@aol.com <Brm0411@aol.com>
Date: Thursday, June 26, 2003 3:44 PM
Subject: Re: [seul-edu] Home schooling question


>Petr R. Vicherek wrote:
>...
>>   If you look at your arguments, then you'll see that either the
students
>> enjoy internet, smaller classes and personal attention because they
are
>> homeschooled, or that they are homeschooled because of lower income
or
>> attention defficiencies.
>
>Please don't make suppositions and then treat them as though they
were
>facts.  You are entitled to your opinions, but you should properly
regard
>them as such and not use them to back your arguments.  If you have
>pointers to applicable studies that you have derived your information
>from, then please share them.
>
>>   Also, few parents would load their children with junk subject
such
>> as "Social Sciences" or "cultural diversity" classes and would
spend
>> the saved time on solid academics.
>
>I hope this is intended to be sarcastic, but I don't see how it
supports
>your point if it is.
>
>>   Most of your factors are thus related to homeschooling situation.
>>   So, there is some truth in the statistics, afterall.
>>
>>   From my experience with homeschooling:
>>   Not knowing how to teach is the third biggest problem, and takes
a year
>> for the parents to learn. Of course, the oldest child suffers the
most.
>> The first and second problem is lack of competitivenes among peers
for
>> the students that need it and lack of authority equal to that of
school
>> teacher.
>
>School teacher and authority in the same sentence?  You must not be
>in the U.S.  (Is the sarcasm in this statement apparent?)
>
>>   No one has such an interest in a child as his own parent. Just
that
>> might make the parents better teachers, because they have the best
>> motivation.
>
>There are lots of children that are not their parent's number one
concern,
>as sad as that is.  I would guess that (just my opinion here, I am
not
>aware of any studies to back it up) very few, if any, of those
children
>are homeschooled.  Which only supports Mr. Downes' argument (which by
my
>interpretation is not that homeschooling is not better, but that the
>statistics cited earlier cannot be used to draw a conclusion as to
why
>homeschooled children do better on standardized tests).
>
>-Don
>
>--
>Don Christensen       Senior Software Development Engineer
>djc@cisco.com         Cisco Systems, Santa Cruz, CA
>   "It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now."