[Perhaps she now realizes why teachers go through 4-5 years of college to become a teacher??]
So, we are on day five of our first year of homeschooling our son (the girls are still in public school). It has been a rough 5 days. I didn't buy a prepkg'd curriculum because I thought I could do without it and make up my own with the "What your Fourth Grader should know" books and using a curriculum outline from another (better) school district to guide me on what to teach.
THus far we have had at least 4 arguments (son and I) about the work. Lots of workbook pages (lang. arts, math, reading (Cricket in Times Square), plus vocab words, spelling words, etc. He fights tooth and nail (except, oddly, with reading the book, which I expected the most aggravation with). Today he pouted and asked when I was going to teach him, and I told him so far he KNOWS what we're doing bc its REVIEW...and there is nothing 'new' yet to 'teach'...long story short, I ended up telling him to find his school clothes (they wear dress code) and I'd wash them so he could go back to school on Monday. He said: "But you just filled the paperwork out to take me out of school", and I replied: "So, I will just look like a fool and tell them we coudln't do it, and you can go back with your friends." (I was very upset at this point). He started to tear up and say he didn't WANT to go back to school, and I asked why and he said he was bored there. BIG FRUSTRATED SIGH!
44 comments
A very good demonstration of why people who hate academics are the last people who should be allowed to home-school, even though they're the first ones to insist on doing it.
Hint: If you're going to be teaching a fourth-grader, you should probably at least be able to spell out "because". And please, lay off the parentheses.
The whole point of homeschool is so you can teach your child at HIS pace, not the snail's pace of the public schools.
Let him go farther ahead. He's bored because he's too far ahead of what the schools are trying to teach him. I know. I was that kid.
As someone who's completing her 5th year of higher education to earn her teaching degree...
No wonder he's bored, you're cramming worksheet after worksheet down his throat. NOBODY LIKES WORKSHEETS. NOT EVEN TEACHERS. But they're easy, so people keep using them like they're the solution to education. Besides, the most engaging and entertaining teaching methods require at least a small group to work with. Let the poor kid go back to school and look into getting him into a gifted program. But most gifted programs focus on math and science, so he might be learning that evil-ution stuff you're so scared of.
Unfortunately, she's asking for advice on RR. They're telling her not to give up and keep at it. Perhaps, relatively-speaking, with words of wisdom with regards to the workload, but they are still advocating her homeschooling the kid.
The real danger-sign is right at the beginning, when she says that she's not even using a curriculum and is making up herself as she goes.
Ummm... so discipline the kid already. What the hell is wrong with you? It sounds like he whines too much (like his momma). And why, if you think homeschooling is better, did you leave the girls out?
*at DayGlow* Exactly. I don't think I've once used a worksheet. I had a Spanish teacher in high school give us crossword puzzles everyday as "worksheets." I've stayed away ever since.
@L (#715556):
I was one of those kids, too. I *wish* I had been home-schooled instead of being stuck in the shitty American public school systems that cater to the lowest common denominator.
I skipped two grades (3rd and 5th);
...and I was *still* bored out of my skull most of the time.
But middle school and high school were far worse. Don't even get me started. I'm 27 and am just now overcoming the lasting negative effects (notably depression--in high school it was even suicidal at points) and I will never recover the years and opportunities wasted (I'm only now able to actually enjoy and do well in my first year of college, after two failed attempts).
I didn't have any friends anyway, due to both my age and my general disdain for idiots, so I think I would've been much happier and more successful had I been home-schooled.
1. This is what happens when the blind lead the blind.
2. Your kid is bored because you just told him that anything they teach in school is not worth knowing. Such as science and history because it contradicts your faith and so he ignores those subjects and is bored.
3. Your definition of better does not match ours.
If he's bored at school it may be because he's very intelligent. That means you probably can't teach him and he shopuld be back in school, but in a program for gifted students.
Bored at school, willful, stubborn and also, apparently, likes to read.
Properly handled, that kid does show the first signs of being potential genius material, or at least a decent hacker/science whiz. He's gonna need to learn to control that temper, though.
One thing I can say with real confidence, however, is that it's extremely likely he'll reject your creepy cult sooner or later. Kids who really like to read very quickly come to appreciate quality literature and the richness of thought and expression behind it, and then tend to utterly reject primitive, weakly-written screed like the bible as the intellectual wasteland that it is.
Besides being on RaptureReady, and discussing homeschooling, there's nothing really fundie, or even particularly disagreeable about this. It sounds like she took him out because he was ahead of his classmates, as in when he said he was bored in school.
And I loved Cricket in Times Square...
"You don't need to do them separately, or don't do geography at all."
THIS is why people don't know where the hell Iraq is, or any other country.
@Dipsy
Why not quote the rest of the post, you dip. It also says that geography is touched on in history anyway.
You people act like this is funny, and it's not. Lot's of people from different backgrounds homeschool, including *gasp* atheists!
If you're loading down your son with pages upon pages of workbook exercises you're not doing it right, and you're making him hate learning.
It's funny because she obviously doesn't know what the hell she's doing, but sad for the kid.
That's interesting. I homeschool my son (for completely secular reasons) and I don't seem to have that problem. Maybe you're boring the shit out of him with work pages that you're just throwing at him as a substitute for your inability to teach.
Put him back in school. Some people are not cut out to be teachers. It's okay. Really.
"That's interesting. I homeschool my son (for completely secular reasons) and I don't seem to have that problem. Maybe you're boring the shit out of him with work pages that you're just throwing at him as a substitute for your inability to teach."
I hope to "unschool" my children someday, while at least making sure that they are conversational about standard curriculum requirements. A tough job, I know, and I'm dreading it, but I hope that I can help them. I went through around twenty years of education and didn't enjoy any of it. I just hope that I can help my children enjoy learning, and help them to find the things that they enjoy doing and learning about.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register . Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.
