I’ve been pretty quiet this week (blogistically speaking). Between my Four Books a Month and following the news on Egypt, in between the regular homeschooling and the fact that the non-stop rain has resulting in Tank and Babypie taking turns having full blown meltdowns, I just haven’t had the energy to blog on top of it. I’ll try to muster a little enthusiasm now, but no promises, as I just got Babypie to sleep after having to hose her and her potty off. No, I don’t want to talk about it. Trust me, you don’t want to hear about it.
I’m also drinking a LARGE glass of wine, so bear with me. Don’t bare with me, though. This is not a pants-optional blog.
So, there’s this online community I read with irregularity (as in, not frequently, not as in I read it when I need to poop). Today, a woman posted this:
hello all. anyone here homeschool? im looking for a affordable online school for children k-4 to start with. where it runs on its own and i get updates on how they are doing. kind of like the douger’s use. if you watch that show. maybe thinking of hs my gurls. of course i have to show the site to my ex and see what he says first, thanx all.
The obvious surface issue with this woman’s desire to homeschool is her poor spelling and grammar, but we’ll just let that one lie. A decent curriculum could help her and her kids, if she were dedicated and involved enough. I’ve learned a lot and expanded my own education through the process of homeschooling, so I fully believe others could do the same, even if they aren’t starting from the same point I was.
No, it’s not her grammatical difficulties that leaped out at me as the glaring problem here. The biggest problem I see is that this mother wants to homeschool her children with no involvement on her part and at little-to-no cost to her. I am immediately put in mind of the project triangle (fast, cheap, good: pick two), only when it comes to homeschooling, those three points on the pyramid would probably be hands-off, inexpensive/free, and thorough. Pick two. You can homeschool with minimal parental involvement (hands-off) and at minimal cost, but the result isn’t going to be a particularly thorough education. You can homeschool on the cheap and do it well, but you aren’t going to be able to do it by plugging your kids into a computer and walking away. You can probably find curricula that are largely hands-off (for the parents, at least) and reasonably thorough, but you bet your ass it isn’t going to be cheap.
You know what is cheap, doesn’t require much parental involvement, and is thorough enough that you can at least feel comfortable that your child is having the basics covered before they graduate? Public school. If you want your child educated without you having to work at it or pay for it, please do your child a favor, and just put her into a public school. She won’t be learning anything at home with a disengaged parent who isn’t willing to invest any time or money into an appropriate curricula. While public schools don’t, on the whole, provide the ideal education for many students, they do at least provide an education that covers all the basic areas. Some public schools even do a really good job (my high school, for example, which is now a magnet school for international studies). Even a subpar school, however, would do a better than than the education received by a Kindergartener and a third grader staring at a computer screen all day while mommy does…what, exactly?
Homeschooling isn’t easy, y’all. It’s usually not cheap. It’s hard work, takes a lot of commitment and planning, and isn’t for someone looking for the easy way to educate children. Even unschoolers (the actual committed variety, not the “I can’t be bothered to make an effort, so we’ll just say we’re unschooling” variety) spent a lot of time interacting with their children, educating them — if in a less formal and traditional manner — and helping enrich their lives. You can’t park your kid in front of Club Penguin all day and call it school. You can’t park them in front of Math Blaster or videos on phonics, either. Human interaction must be part of education. If you can’t do it, please let someone else do it.
Of course, I also take issue to one response to this woman, which said:
I have to be blunt here–as a public school teacher, I get a little resentful when parents think they can give their kid a better education than we can provide, especially when they write things like “skool” and “gurl.”
Four years in an education program doesn’t make you better qualified to teach my child. That has been made abundantly clear to me through my own public school career (12 years), through my time in the English Ed. program (changed majors after my first round of student teaching, a story for another day), and through my time as the parent of a public schooled child. This woman’s problem isn’t that she thinks she can do a better job than a public school teacher, because with enough effort, self-education, and the right curricula, she might. The problem isn’t that she doesn’t spell well or use grammar, because if she’s devoted to continued her education along with her daughters’, that can improve. The problem is that she wants to put in minimal effort, yet expects maximum output.
Which, come to think of it, was one of the biggest problems we had with Captain Science’s last public school teacher.
