I just spent the last 5 years of my life learning to be an effective teacher. I am now spending another 6 months learning to be an effective special education teacher. I have firm beliefs about many things. Like Audrey Hepburn "I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles." I believe in God and all that he does. The most important thing that I believe in, is a child going to school. Like I said I spent 5 years learning how to be an effective teacher. To me there is nothing about just being a mother that can give you the proper education you need to teach your child. There is more to teaching than just pencil and paper instruction. You need to incorporate all of the basic skills of math, science, reading, language arts, spelling, history, and extra curricular activities. Also as a parent you need to know how to spell basic words. When I see parents who can't spell, use proper grammar, or add 2 and 2 and then say they are home schooling their child, my skin crawls. Home schooling is the Most Restrictive Environment for a child who has learning disabilities, speech problems, or intellectual disabilities, and my guess even if your child has no disability, he/she does not learn the same way as his/her sibling. Each child is different even within a family.
You can say that your 4 year old is reading at a second grade level, but what qualifies you to discern that? Do they have the fluency of an 8 year old, or the comprehension and fluency? You wouldn't know that. There is a significant difference between "fluency" (the ability to sound out and actually read the words) and "comprehension" (the ability to tell you after reading what the word means). Their 4 year old brain is not developed enough to be able to not only read the words on a page but also tell you what all of the words meant. I can't tell you how many parents told me (when I was student teaching in Kindergarten and 3rd grade) that their child is advanced beyond their grade in reading, and after we assessed their reading level we found that their comprehension and fluency was average to their age.
To those parents who think that their child is reading far above their level, how are you assessing that? Just having them read to you? That's not how you know. This is just one of the things that bothers me about home schooling.
I know that you are the mother or the father of said child, but once in a while a parent needs to think that maybe they don't always know what's best. I am not writing this to criticize a parents skills as a parent. However unless you are a teacher home schooling your child you can't know all there is to know about helping your child learn and succeed. Ultimately you are giving your child a disadvantage because you are just teaching the base knowledge of what you know. A high school diploma doesn't give you a lot of background knowledge to teach your child.
Not everyone is going to agree with this post because I am not a parent, I am just a teacher. Home schooler's have their own reasons for teaching their children at home. Whether it be for reasons of money or religious beliefs. It seems to me that a lot of parents I see home schooling are doing it because they are afraid that their child/ren will be exposed to the real world.
You can only shelter your child for so long. If you hide them from everything that you deem to be inappropriate, like things that will come about in school, what do you think will happen when they grow up and go out into the real world? This new surge of home schooling worries me that the next generation will be a group of maladjusted, sheltered adults.
This blog is my opinion, if you don't agree that's fine. I feel that the education I have and the application of said education gives me a certain ability to have these feelings.
