Home Schooling

So, you want to homeschool your child.  Good on you.  That is a real winner, is it not?  You have your reasons and I am sure that they are fantastic.  Let us examine some of the more common amongst them just a little bit:

• You are afraid your child is not getting enough attention in a standard classroom given classroom sizes.
  • Unless you are sitting in front of your child for the whole class-time experience, is your child getting that much more attention?  The homeschooling curriculum consists of self-contained teaching documents requiring little or no intervention from the “instructor”.  So really, how much is this experience better than the classroom.
  • While your precious little bundle of joy may just get more attention, I am sure that the social interaction of being with other students of the same age would or should trump any loss of personal attention.
  • If your child has special educational needs requiring additional attention from an educator, I can see the problem.  However, are you the best solution for the child’s special needs?
• You do not like what is being taught in the school system.
  • Guess what.  The home schooling materials are teaching the exact same things that your public school teacher is teaching.  That is not an opinion.  That is the law.  If you teacher is exceeding this mandate, you can have them removed. 
  • That goes both ways however; they cannot teach you special desired beliefs either.  Easy solution this.  Teach them at home.  Personally, I think that beliefs do not belong in the classroom anyway.  I think  they belong in the home so there is no conflict with a public school.
• Your precious one has been kicked out of school.
  • I do not think I have to address this one too much.  You had better deal with the problem with you child in much more positive ways than to avoid the problem by homeschooling.  It will only defer the problem to a later date.
• Your child’s teacher is bad.
  •  Now this may be temporarily required the real solution is that if the teacher is bad, get rid of them.  In today’s environment, there are too many avenues available to get rid of incompetent teachers.  Even if this is not possible, we are talking about a single year problem, at most.
  • Being honest, however, most of the conflicts between parents and teachers or students and teachers are results of the fact that parents (or students) do not get along with teacher because of conflict of honest appraisal of reality.
  • Regardless of what the conflicts or appraisals of the teacher are consider this when determining the plan to replace you public school teacher with homeschooling:
    • The teacher has, generally speaking; a Master’s Degree in Education, Teacher’s Certification, Continuing Education Training and Credits, and multiple years of experience.  You are planning to replace that teacher with yourself.  What are your credentials?