Miss Raquel's biggest reason to homeschool is....

[alba]

#4 on that list bothers me because it totally misses the point. Public school kids aren't deprived of spending time with people in other age groups; they meet their friends' parents, spend time with their grandparents, etc. They also tend to socialise with people from a broad range of backgrounds, whereas many Christian homeschooling families only spend time with each other and their church buddies.

More importantly, however, when homeschooling is criticised because of a lack of socialisation, it does not mean that the children don't spend time with people outside their family. It refers to children's understanding of cultural memes and ability to converse with people their OWN age on a variety of topics (Libby Anne over at Love, Joy, Feminism describes it much better than that). Miss Raquel is a few years younger than me (18-20?), and most people in that age group I can converse with just fine, but reading Raquel's blog is like trying to have a conversation with a twelve-year-old.

Well, I know that on a different board (not saying the name because they know about us and they don't like us - I'm sure you can figure it out) the Christian Moms would "encourage" each other; and there was a lot of people who would post things like "I have 4 kids under 5 and I'm pregnant, I have morning sickness and I can't seem to homeschool my 7 year old and my 9 year old, should I send them to public school?" and the other moms would come and tell that woman not to send the kids to school, to just take a break, and that they were in a season where it's rough, but you can pick it back up later. Some of the women seemed to ALWAYS be "on a break" from homeschooling.

I don't see a problem with taking, say, two months off when you've got morning sickness IF you don't do summer holidays (especially if you ordinarily teach seven days a week); public school kids get two months off in the summer anyway, so there's no real difference between that and taking those two months off in the fall when mom's pregnant and educating through the summer. The problem is when breaks become the norm.

I was in a book club with a group of women who all had advanced degrees in English and Creative Writing. Our book club discussions were quite different from the club in the city I moved to next. There, while the women were all college educated, they were not English majors. One woman in particular tended to believe that if a book was written in first person, it was an actual autobiography.

:shock:

[terranova]

My husband has two degrees from a British university but couldn't tell you what 10% of 100 is. While he might know more maths than a 6 year old, it would be a close thing.

[Flossie]

Here's my post for when this really happens to Miss Raquels future children:

If a fifteen year old is behind a six year old in math, then questions should be asked. Indeed, questions about this issue should have been asked long before.

Does the fifteen year old have a low IQ and the six year old have a very high IQ?

Have the children been taught differently or been taught by different people?

But for the purposes of this thread I'm assuming that Miss Raquel is the teacher in both cases, and has probably used the same teaching methods for both children.

If both children are of similar intellect and being taught by the same person using the same methods, it's possible that the older child has a different learning style that is not compatible with her teaching methods.

It's possible that the younger child is just very good at math, but from what I've gathered here I doubt that Miss Raquel is capable of teaching even a gifted child to that degree.

It could be that the older child is lazy and his mother isn't interested in pushing him.

If the older child also has reading difficulty it could mean he's dyslexic. Mom needs outside help here and I doubt she'll look for it.

The older child could be getting the message from Mom that education isn't that important.

The older child could have decided he's stupid (at least in regards to math) and it's not important enough to his parents to attempt more than minimal education.

The older child could be depressed that his life and his parents suck and there's no point in trying.

There are many reasons why this could be happening, but Miss Raquel's laissez faire attitude is only going to exacerbate the issue.

[Sola]

A friend of my mom's home schooled her three boys. My mom would say that her friend would say that there were some days where they would just "never get around" to doing home school, but it was ok because other days she would have them working "all day."

In another case, my brother's best friend's sister was home schooled in high school. When she tried to enroll at the local technical school they told her they wouldn't accept her homeschool completion certificate. She had to take classes to get a GED before they would let her enroll. I don't really know if she ever went through with it.

I don't actually think there is anything wrong with the bolded. I have homeschooled/educated for a year when the girl was 7 and have a friend who has always homeschooled her kids (we call it home education here). In three hours of homeschooling I could achieve more than a school could in one day. Simply because of the 1 to 1 attention and the lack of distractions. Neither did I stick by Monday to Friday school thing. Some weeks we had a couple of days off midweek but worked through the weekends. The beauty of homeschool/education is that you don't have to stick to the 9am til 3pm Mon to Fri schedule. My friend is not a morning person and neither are her kids, they don't begin to do school work until the afternoon, but will work into the evenings.