Comment by demosthanos

Comment by demosthanos 3 months ago

We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.

We think we have a relationship with our own child that allows us to understand what they need and how to communicate with them in a way that works for them. We think we have the time (assuming one parent is full time parenting) to give our child the attention they need to excel. And we believe that a combination of relationship and individual attention goes further in K–12 than any amount of formal training in education.

spiderfarmer 3 months ago

You can do all that on top of a normal education.

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ndriscoll 3 months ago

If you do that, the normal education is redundant. You wouldn't put a university student in class to learn multiplication; it's an insulting waste of their time. Why would you do the same to a 10 year old who mastered it years ago?

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demosthanos 3 months ago

Not really—public school takes up 6+ hours of every day, and I'd like my kids to have self-directed time as well. If we tried to do some sort of after-school tutoring with mom that would deprive them of valuable time to choose their own stuff to work on.
And what would be the point? If we're right that their mom is better equipped to teach them than a teacher is (because of time to dedicate to them and a personal relationship and understanding) then what do we gain by having a teacher do it too?
(This isn't the thread for the socializing argument, because OP started with teacher qualifications. I'll just add that we are aware of that concern and have strong mitigations in place.)

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ahmeneeroe-v2 3 months ago

Not really. There are only so many hours in the day. The time between school and bedtime is extremely limited and involves other time consuming activities such as after school sports and eating dinner.
I work on homework with my kid every day and after all those things it's not like we have time (or she has energy) to fill in holes in her at-school learning

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- spiderfarmer 3 months ago
  
  I teach my kids valuable lessons in the car, during dinner and on evening walks. But I’m not in a country that is starving their education system.
  
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  ahmeneeroe-v2 3 months ago
  
  This is asinine.
  Next time you're in the car, try teaching your kid about solving systems of equations where both are linear vs one is linear and the other is parabolic. It's a lot easier to sketch it out on scratch paper than to pontificate from the driver's seat.
  
  Reply View | 2 replies

ubertaco 3 months ago

>We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.

While this is a good and rational awareness of one's own capabilities, as someone who grew up in Bible-belt homeschooling circles and saw a wide variance in approaches and effectiveness, the "homeschool co-op"/"homeschool group" model where one parent teaches one subject to many kids, classroom-style, is super common. See, for example, "Classical Conversations" [1], a pretty common one in my area, that leans on "parent as classroom teacher to many kids", without much in the way of prerequisite qualifications.

[1] https://classicalconversations.com/

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