How many FJ's were home schooled?

[Braggnation]

love hearing all this. I'm so glad to read real live HS grads.

We started homeschooling after the economy tanked and we couldn't afford the great private school my kids were in. It's not perfect by any stretch but I am proud to say I have all of my kids 2 and in one case 3 grades ahead in Math now. Since we aren't crazy my kids are learning everything. We use a secular "school in a box" curriculum and if all goes well the kids will be back in school within another school year. I'm glad I was able to see both sides (private/homeschool) and I am pretty confident that I'm not ruining my kids. I do see extremes within the HS community and it worries me.

My husband went to a private all boys academy and then ivy league for uni/grad. I went to public school in the hood and learned how to sling weed.............. I know not all public schools are like this but I'm not willing to test it out on my own. For us, HS was the ONLY alternative to private school. Public was never even discussed. We have a VERY diverse group of friends so I have never worried about them learning about being around different cultures.

You have to work on it to make it work. I like our flexible schedule and wouldn't trade it for the world right now. Our vacations and field trips have been awesome since we can go during the week and off season. The kids still have their friends from their old school plus new homeschooled ones along the way. I do notice that the HS families are more intolerant of us since we aren't uber Christian as opposed to our private school families.

I think the biggest downfall of HS'ing is enough "normal" families. no extremes, just normal families who want the best for their kids

[freejoytoo]

Please teach your kids that England is not an island, but is firmly attached to both Wales and Scotland! :mrgreen:

This is one of my pet peeves! Everyone thinking that Britain is the same country as England and that Scotland and Wales are separate from it (which they are not at this moment in time), and that a 'British' accent is the same thing as an English accent, and that there is only one type of it. A lot of Americans also don't know that Ireland is split into two countries and the north is part of the UK and there also seems to be this belief that the rest of Ireland goes around chattering in Gaelic.

[ladidah]

I was homeschooled K-12. Since you couldn't get accredited diplomas for homeschooling in my state, I have no high school diploma, but I loved college and am working on my second graduate degree. My own homeschooling experience prepared me well for higher education.

For what it's worth, my parents and many of my homeschooling friends' families were religious (mostly Protestant evangelical and Catholic, plus a few Jewish families) and committed to providing their kids with the best education possible. There were also a few homeschooling families in our community who could have done better by their kids academically. This is anecdotal, of course, and I'm not suggesting anyone take my experience as necessarily reflective of homeschooling as a whole. However, I do want to point out that religion, including evangelical/fundy-lite Christianity, isn't always in conflict with good academics.

I am a no-longer-evangelical Christian, and I am considering homeschooling my own kids, possibly as far as 8th-10th grade. If I do homeschool them up until that point, I will then send them either to community college or a traditional high school to get their degrees before they head off to four-year colleges (assuming they're inclined to do so). The one thing that scares me retrospectively about my K-12 education is that I would have had no way to prove I'd ever done any schoolwork if for some reason I'd had to quit college before I got my bachelor's degree. I want to make sure my kids don't run that risk.

[Austin]

Just like everything else, this is a personal preference and I don't really think there's a strong anti-homeschooling sentiment on FJ. Maybe anti-homeskooling (SOTDRT), but the FJers who homeschool do not even remotely fit into that category.

I support people doing whatever they think is best for their children in their particular situation. I personally am a strong public school advocate because that's what was best for our particular children and in keeping with out personal values and worldview. Plenty of homeschoolers do a great job, and I respect their choice as well.

[Spider Burps]

I was home schooled (kind of) for my last year of school. :lol: I went to public school from kindergarten through 10th grade, but then I found out at the end of my 10th grade year that I only needed six more credits to graduate (we took six credits a day, but one was required to be an elective). My district wouldn't let me take that class in lieu of an elective (their solution was for me to stay that second year and take "lots of electives"), so my mom let me do the last two years of school online in order to let me graduate and start university early. I didn't read the books and just took the tests--and because you got to try them twice, I just did it once, got the answers, then did it again. My version of "home schooling" practically made the SOTDRT look like quality education.

[ilovetchotchkes]

This is one of my pet peeves! Everyone thinking that Britain is the same country as England and that Scotland and Wales are separate from it (which they are not at this moment in time), and that a 'British' accent is the same thing as an English accent, and that there is only one type of it. A lot of Americans also don't know that Ireland is split into two countries and the north is part of the UK and there also seems to be this belief that the rest of Ireland goes around chattering in Gaelic.

LOL sorry i meant PART of an island. My fingers, they are faster than my BRAIN! And with me being 1/4 Scots/Irish (That side of the family has a WEIRD family tree and they went back and forth between the 2 countries) , and my MIL being ALL British, I will definitely NOT tell them its all the same place.

[Conuly]

LOL sorry i meant PART of an island. My fingers, they are faster than my BRAIN! And with me being 1/4 Scots/Irish (That side of the family has a WEIRD family tree and they went back and forth between the 2 countries) , and my MIL being ALL British, I will definitely NOT tell them its all the same place.

Of course, it'd be really funny if you did. Maybe at the next family reunion?

Edit: This seems like as good a time as any to post The Venn Diagram. Which is apparently a Euler diagram.

http://qntm.org/uk (I doubt they care if I link to them.)

[ilovetchotchkes]

Of course, it'd be really funny if you did. Maybe at the next family reunion?

Ohno, i had to LIE to my husband's grandmother and tell her we were Welsh because she's afraid of IRISH PEOPLE. ANd she's like 90 and in failing health so I just rolled my eyes and went along with it.

[Conuly]

Ohno, i had to LIE to my husband's grandmother and tell her we were Welsh because she's afraid of IRISH PEOPLE. ANd she's like 90 and in failing health so I just rolled my eyes and went along with it.

No, I guess you shouldn't cause troubles for granny-in-law. *sigh*

[smores]

I was homeschooled via Abeka distance learning videos for one year in middle school. It didn't last because I didn't learn crap, but luckily I had been in honors classes the year before so none of the material was new.

[Daenerys]

The problem seems to be that homeschooling is so poorly supervised it is very much luck of the draw... you could have a great time if you are encouraged to be intellectually curious by your parents and given the chance to question and debate, but many homeschoolers (particularly but not only fundys) will limit their child's knowledge to what they see as being the 'right' path, hence stifling their development and in particular their critical thinking skills. It can also function as a cover for abuse, whether physical or mental, as one of the major outlets where children can tell someone what is happening is removed from them.

I didn't have the best time at school but I'm glad I went to one for all the non academic life skills that it taught me.

[smores]

I was homeschooled through ABeka for two years (7th and 8th grade). My mom and stepfather went fundie, and I was living with them at the time. Previously, I had gone to an elite private school, and my mom and stepfather decided that I had become too wordly, so started looking into homeschooling options. My mom is pretty lazy, so ABeka appealed to her, because they had videos, and she didn't have to do anything other than grade my tests from an answer key. The curriculum was woeful, and the only reason I got into an elite private high school was because I have always had a real thirst for knowledge and I basically educated myself through outside sources over those two years. I moved in with my grandparents when I was still in the 8th grade and still homeschooling through ABeka, and fortunately, my grandparents supported my decision to go back to "regular" school. Adjusting to high school was difficult, especially since I had no friends while I was homeschooled. But luckily, I didn't suffer any lasting ill effects from my experience. However, I would never homeschool my son.

This story is almost exactly like mine! I was homeschooled for 8th grade using those abysmal videos. I ended up at a nationally ranked public magnet school for high school and I am so thankful I did.

I had friends from my old school when I was homeschooled, but it wasn't the same. It didn't affect me long term though, but I wouldn't choose it as a method, either. I am glad to see that someone else took that crap learning and turned it into a good educational experience via a real school later on. :clap:

[Turtle]

I homeschooled for a few years in high school. At the time I thought I would never ever homeschool my own kids, but now that I actually have kids I am considering it. The schools in our district are so terrible, and there is no way we could afford to move. My family wasn't fundie (although maybe fundie lite at the time) but we used Abeka because it was easy. Fortunately I was a good reader and able to motivate myself, otherwise it would have been a complete waste of two years. I went back to real school for the last 2 years of high school and was able to catch up quickly thanks to some really good teachers.

When I homeschooled, I only knew people who chose it for religious reasons or athletic reasons. So, either a serious lack of science/history with a stress on "Bible" classes or practically no education whatsoever since they spent most of the day training. Now, I have actually met a few families that decided to homeschool for educational reasons and it seems that their kids are actually getting a good education. Seeing it work has changed my perspective and made me consider it. We have another year before our oldest would start kindergarten, so I'm starting to look around at co-ops and resources.

[Minerva]

My mom came pretty close to homeschooling me as of the 6th grade because I was being bullied so badly. We ended up not, since she couldn't quit work for financial reasons. I would have been alright academically and socially since my parents are teachers, my family is non-religious, and I had much better friends outside of high school than in high school with the exception of maybe two really amazing people. I was awkward and quiet, and high school didn't change a thing about that. BUT I wouldn't have had a bilingual high school diploma, wouldn't be working on a bilingual degree right now, and I might not still be bilingual at all since both my parents are Anglophones. Teaching our kids a language you yourself can't speak is not something you can do.

[keen23]

Public school all the way. K-6 was a very small neighborhood school with under 300 kids in it. There were 26 kids in my entire "class" the smallest to ever go through the school since it opened in 1903. With very few exceptions we were together from Kinder to 6th spread over two classrooms per grade (though there were so few of us, many teachers would put the classes together and co-teach our year). Going from that very small environment to Jr High, with 350+ people in my grade was a shock- but a welcome one. It was nice to finally meet people that I hadn't known since 1983. School was pretty easy for me, and I was pretty good at making friends-however the majority of my close friends are from elementary school still.

8th grade was somewhat awful, in that the town closed down the other Jr High, and put all 8th graders in the entire town in one school. There was a group of girls who were total bitches, and of course I wound up in all of their classes without any of my old friends. The Queen Bitch ironically wound up being my college roommate and is now one of my closest friends.

9th-12th grade was pretty easy as well. I was in the honors programs, so I got to take the "good" classes like Botany, Intro to Accounting and Literature of the Utopias.

[AmandaP]

I was homeschooled/unschooled (the careless kind, not the ClibbyJo kind).

I did fine with it. I was severely depressed throughout my teen years and took refuge in books. I also have an highly eiditic memory. So even though my parents didn't direct my education very much, I learned a lot from my reading. I wish I had been given a more rigorous education; I think it would have made a significant difference in my career. I also think that school would have been traumatizing to my sad, anxious, social-misfit self. However, my whole family would have probably benefited from some public accountability. All of my siblings suffered academically from educational neglect. I put myself through university and now have an MA but none of my 4 siblings have even considered college...

Can you tell I have mixed feelings about this subject?

[Just_Jane]

I was homeschool from the middle of the 8th grade through about age 16 because of bullying and anxiety issues. my parents had consider sending me to the local Catholic school which probably would have been fine but I would have been in the last year of classes for them and would have had to go to one of the two private high schools in the area. Both of which were way out of the family budget. Plus they were worried that I'd be further ostracized because my family doesn't have money and both private high schools tended to attract those families that could buy their 16 year olds brand new luxury cars and go on big vacations. I took the GED at 16 and then went on to community college.

[Conuly]

The problem seems to be that homeschooling is so poorly supervised it is very much luck of the draw... you could have a great time if you are encouraged to be intellectually curious by your parents and given the chance to question and debate, but many homeschoolers (particularly but not only fundys) will limit their child's knowledge to what they see as being the 'right' path, hence stifling their development and in particular their critical thinking skills. It can also function as a cover for abuse, whether physical or mental, as one of the major outlets where children can tell someone what is happening is removed from them.

Unfortunately, this applies to schooling in schools (god DAMN I wish we had a neutral and sensible term for this to correspond with homeschooling!) as well. In some schools, they're overcrowded, the funding isn't there, and nobody learns much. There is a local school near me that's closing because they've had less than a 20% passing rate on the statewide tests for a few years. And even in a good school, sometimes you get a crappy or ineffective teacher. There just aren't any guarantees.

Abuse happens in schools as well, both by other students and by authority figures. In my own city, there's a very recent scandal involving sex abuse in at least two schools. The school I just mentioned that's closing? I personally know three families who take the same train I do in the morning because they transferred their kids out of that school for rampant bullying. When confronted on this, the school's original approach was to make false and trumped-up reports to child services about the complaining parent.

Some schools, even some public schools, push a religious agenda on students. This is wrong, of course, but it still goes on. And even in schools where it's not supported, some individual teachers still manage to do so.

This doesn't mean that I don't think homeschooling needs more oversight. I think that it absolutely does. And it doesn't mean that I think all schools are terrible either. Far from it! Most of them are just fine for the majority of students, and most teachers are good people who are at least competent at their jobs.

But there just are no guarantees. You can get a crappy education in the schools just as easily as you can with your lazy fundy parents.

[O Latin]

I was "unschooled" until fifth grade. I have mixed feelings about it. At the time, I hated it, mostly because it made me feel so strange and different from everyone else. Looking back, I think I would have fewer social anxiety issues if I had gone to school from the beginning (I don't know if I actually have a diagnosable social anxiety disorder or not, but I definitely have issues). Academically, I was fine. When I did go to school I had no problems catching up.

If I ever have kids, I want their education to be academically rigorous, much more than it is in public schools, so I would consider homeschooling if it was financially possible. But I wouldn't do it the way my mom did. It would be much more structured and planned.

[LilMissMetaphor]

My daughter goes to public school, not because I think she learns more there (she doesn't). But she's the type of person who benefits from the social setting, and I am too lazy to homeschool her.

I was homeschooled until age 12, at which point I entered high school, grade 9. I quickly realized I knew much more than any of my peers (most of whom were two years older), even given my mother's rather mediocre efforts towards teaching me math and science. I was not very popular in my first few years of school. Kids tend not to like kids who are younger, smarter, and who don't have to work as hard to achieve the same results.

There's no doubt in my mind I could educate my daughter more competently than the majority of the teachers she'll encounter, but as I said, I'm not that motivated.

[snarkykitty]

I wasn't, but I was so insanely miserable at school that as a child (and honestly, as an adult) I wished I had been. I also learned very little at school (even in the gifted classes) until high school. Mostly I already knew what they were "teaching" me, so I was both miserable AND bored.

Sorry to veer off-topic but I have a few questions because I am wildly curious about this sort of thing.

- What criteria were used to determine that you were "gifted"?

- What area were you "gifted" in?

- What is done in the "gifted classes" compared to non-gifted classes?

- How did you "already know" what they teachers were teaching you? For example, did you know lots of facts or theories, have a strong vocabulary, or know how to do complex math equations? You indicate that this happened a lot - "mostly" - so how did you acquire the information for "most" of what was being taught, before it was taught?

We didn't have "gifted" classes in my schools, just a single honors track in grades 7-8, and and in high school Honors 1 and Honors 2, and the access (based on grades and proficiency) to AP classes in a few different academic areas.

[JenniferJuniper]

I should have been in my early years (Grades 1 - 3) but my mother had too many little ones around with no support other than a paycheck from my father.

I attended school in a two-room Victorian-era schoolhouse. (and mind you, this was in the early 70's about 20 miles outside of Boston, not on a prairie in the 1940's). First and second grades shared the room on the first floor (half the room was one grade, the other half the other) and the third grade had the room one the second floor.

The place was dark and dank and noisy and crowded and aside from the fact that there was no longer any ink in the inkwells, it looked exactly like it must have in 1880. Freaked. Me. Out. I was forever escaping and trying to walk the two miles home. The teacher hated me because she had to constantly keep an eye on me, and I was nearly thrown out of school permanently for being disruptive (without ever saying a word!) and constantly in trouble with my father because of this. Transferring wasn't an option as my mother couldn't provide transportation. In general, the whole experience was less than learning-conducive.

My mother tried to help compensate by getting me a library card, and as I fortunately loved to read, this is the only reason I was able to keep up and eventually fit in once I made it to a more "normal" school environment.

Bottom line, there are a variety reasons why some kids may not belong in school. I think parents need to assess their children’s individual needs and schooling options, and if home schooling is ideal but not viable, find other ways to fill whatever gaps they can.

[longskirts]

I was unschooled for a couple years as a teen. It worked out okay, but I would be more structured about it if I had kids.

[JesusFightClub]

Sorry to veer off-topic but I have a few questions because I am wildly curious about this sort of thing.

- What criteria were used to determine that you were "gifted"?

- What area were you "gifted" in?

- What is done in the "gifted classes" compared to non-gifted classes?

- How did you "already know" what they teachers were teaching you? For example, did you know lots of facts or theories, have a strong vocabulary, or know how to do complex math equations? You indicate that this happened a lot - "mostly" - so how did you acquire the information for "most" of what was being taught, before it was taught?

We didn't have "gifted" classes in my schools, just a single honors track in grades 7-8, and and in high school Honors 1 and Honors 2, and the access (based on grades and proficiency) to AP classes in a few different academic areas.

Haha, I can semi-answer this one. I had to write an essay first to see if I was gifted (and it was hidden) or just really thick. They showed me a picture of some shit (I recall it as being stick figures outside a house but this may be wrong) and I wrote a story about it. Can't remember what I wrote.

Then you get the IQ test. Which went dramatically pearshaped in my case. I have had quite a few of these in my career through life. I score in the low eighties. So they abandoned "gifted but hiding it" and went for "really thick" ;)

The difference is day and night really. In advanced English at my school you would be expected to read Shakespeare and the like whereas in the lowest track, you get printed handouts in big writing and write about how you feel about them.

And then there's Special Education, where I did me time ;) A few classes a week. I would be sat next to an 11 year old boy, at the age of 17, painstakingly copying out sentences from a book and listening to a sweet older lady talk about my spatial difficulties. So that was the lowest rung of the ladder, but there were marked differences.

I did OK in languages but I was enrolled by force into Maths For The Thick (er, it wasn't called that, but). Counting is the limit of my abilities to this day, and I still count on my fingers. We had a very embittered teacher who would rant on about how we were all going to end up on the dole anyway. I bet that didn't happen in advanced maths :D

I heard they did parabolas.

[Conuly]

Because you asked, in NYC the gifted program starts in kindergarten. Back then there may have been ways to pull strings (certainly, that's the argument for the changes to the program that have been made recently), but my family certainly didn't know which strings to pull. I got in by taking an IQ test and being evaluated.

As far as knowing what they taught, I was reading when I was three, and by five I had graduated to encyclopedias and similar. I know from looking at my IEP that I was reading on a college level by the time I was in the 3rd grade, and nobody bothered trying to teach me how to read, they just told me to read on my own until the "class caught up". In math, with the exception of multiplication (which I learned "the hard way", by counting on my fingers until the numbers stuck out of self defense) I mostly grasped the concept either the first time it was taught or before they explained it. Even in gifted classes, there's a lot of repetition. Because of my habit of reading under my desk and daydreaming instead of paying attention, I had plenty of time to think and to come up with number patterns, so I worked out on my own a lot of ways to do math that seemed simpler to me but that teachers had no intention of teaching for several grades yet (or ever) - like using factors to do multiplication and division (because I couldn't be bothered to learn most of my times tables), or finding squares by adding sets of odd numbers.

I went from gifted programs in elementary school to magnet programs for gifted kids in intermediate school, and then to a specialized high school where you have to pass a test to get in. At this point I started competing not against other bright kids but also against kids who were sent to Saturday school since first grade with the goal of entering this high school, and I actually had to *work*, which I didn't want to do, so at this point I transferred to my local high school and continued with my practice of only doing just enough work to pass, and usually after the due date. (Actually, it was a little more complicated than that, my issues with high school, but that certainly didn't HELP.)

But since I effectively was never in non-gifted education until the last two years of high school, I don't really know how they teach differently in other classes. In my schools, the gifted classes largely functioned as a separate school within the greater school, there wasn't much mingling with the other kids.

Edit: In some ways, incidentally, being in the gifted program wasn't always the best thing. For example, I qualified as a young child both for speech therapy and for practical therapy due to my poor motor coordination. I was lacking both in fine and gross motor skills, severely. Although I did get the speech lessons, the school basically told my parents that I couldn't get all those pull-outs and remain in the gifted program, so I didn't get the other help I qualified for. (The school may have misled my parents, I don't know.) I was literally falling down all over myself through my teens, and to this day my handwriting is very childish and I cut my fingers at least three or four times a week cooking, no matter how careful I am. I would've been bored either way.