Have you experienced tutoring your children for their homework? It is like you are being a student again. When some cousins from the province stayed with us for a year to study high school in our city, I had just graduated from college and was looking for a job. In the dinner table, the usual topic would be their schooling. And after dinner, expect those 2 cousins to seek my help with their homework. It's okay to help them but sometimes I have difficulty particularly with the English subject. But fortunately, I was able to be of help all the time and was just too glad when they both finished high school and moved back to the province.
I have attempted a few times to help my grandson's with their homework. Now that they are in middle school and high school I am not able to help very much since the way they are being taught in school is so different from how I was taught. I do wonder if this new teaching method is good since the schools do not teach penmanship any more.
I tutored my son when he had problems with Maths back in 7th and 8th grade, but afterwards I hired a private teacher for him, as it rapidly got out of hand for me. I am recently tutoring children grades 1 through 5th as a volunteer at a nearby day center.
I used to help my six maternal-side cousins with their homework when they were 10 and younger. I was then 20 years old so the ten years age difference were not a problem at all to understand their assignments and help them go through. However since before this teaching time, and helping my five-year younger sister, I realized the more years of difference in between my education and the education younger people received, the poorer education has turned through the years. Actually children barely learn in college what we learned in kindergarten, LOL
. I always supplemented their school lessons with at home. Not only math and spelling. But politics, various religions, just real world stuff.
I homeschooled my seven children way up to year 12. Three older daughters have/had their own careers now (oldest is married and a stay-at-home mom). Two teens have been in a Christian college for 2 years now, years 10 and 11. Two are still homeschooling (9 and 12 years old). I can't say I've been an expert teacher, but I'm glad to be learning with them, as well.
There are several choices in curricula available for a reasonable price that will make the job of homeschooling easy, plus there are online and DVD choices that can result in elementary, middle school, and high school degrees. Much of the available curricula is Christian in nature, but not all. Different states have different rules on homeschooling, but that is a good way to protect your child from some of the indoctrination that goes on in public schools. Several states now offer a virtual (Internet) school at the high school level but you would then, of course, be subject to the same Common Core curriculum that is itself a problem, although the effects would be reduced considerably by your presence.
Not having children, I cannot venture an opinion. Something I have done is give training and tuition to people for whom English is not a first language. This has its own challenges; you have to be very precise and correct about what you are saying. You cannot, for instance, use colloquial or dialect terms and you have to be aware of how well acquainted your trainees are with the language. Almost inevitably, people are at different levels and one of the challenges is to pitch your training at the right level. To paraphrase Lincoln, you can never satisfy all of the people all of the time, but what you can do is find a level at which everybody is comfortable.
I had a look at Common Core-- I wouldn't want to provoke my children into an I-hate-school anger. ACE, Rod & Staff, Son Light, Christian Light Publication, Bob Jones University, Abeka were just some of the learning tools we went through. We look into some favorites: YouTube Sciences and simple DIYs for children. We call it YouTube Academy LOL. And Brave Writers paid lessons. Subscribed to Mathletics and Spellodrome. It's still reasonable for our budget to homeschool compared to tuition in college.
Maybe anger was what was needed, rightly, to prevent the dumbing down of all the schools (if there should even be "public" schools ) ? And to "persuade"? more parents and home-schooling communities , teaching everything in ways that actually worked for generations. Especially how to live daily - how to cook, clean, wash dishes, laundry, yard work, take care of pets/farm animals/ the housework and maybe community things ?
Ive taught in schools and colleges for 50 years. Ive also home schooled my own children, grand children and great grand children. To more ore less extents. There is one thing I learned in my own training that I made every effort to adhere to throughout my teaching: Be unbiased. In the public system that was easy. Stick to the curriculum, maintain an enquiring mind, rely on facts, continue searching for truth. What concerned me was not all parents and teachers are capable of such things. A religious school has its bent. An unorthodox school has its own version of world view. Even a so called state school can rely heavily on those in political power. Fir a relative or friend to take on home schooling it is worth that prson examining their motivations to do so. If it is anything less than allowing the student to establish their own best way then it will let them down in the long run. Education can start at home but it needs to be open and well discussed with allowances for discression
No, Gwen. My English teacher told me that anyone who read what I wrote and could only criticise the grammar and spelling was unworthy of your thoughts. “ leave them to their ignorance” were his words. Andrew Cross was his name and he gave me the confidence to write. That can’t be such a bad thing, can it?
My younger great-granddaughter will be going into pre-K this fall. My granddaughter is taking a year off from teaching (General Science. Chemistry and Biology), so she's holding "Pre-Pre-K" classes at her home a couple days a week for the little one and the two boys of her best friend. They study (numbers, letters, colors, shapes, printing, etc.) for a couple of hours in the morning while they're still attentive, followed by an hour of running and screaming in the yard, lunch and then a half-hour "review" of what they covered that morning. By then, everybody (and I do mean EVERYBODY) is ready for a nap. She has a whole classroom set up in the playroom....desks, whiteboard, everything, so that the kids can get ready for having to sit and pay attention for a few hours at a time. Back when I started school, there was no kindergarten; you just started out in first grade. Most kids barely knew their colors, never mind shapes, letters, numbers. These days, it seems that the schools expect the kids to enter Pre-K or especially kindergarten fully grasping all that. I feel sorry for the kids who enter completely unprepared. My two "step" granddaughters are in 4th and 1st grades. The 4th-grader is showing signs of being a great teacher. She loves to "hold class" and works diligently with her sister who is having a little trouble keeping up. When I was babysitting a couple of weeks ago, she held a school session and did a whole presentation on "diversity" to her sister and me and had us role-playing. I was very impressed with her presentation. The teacher has said that she is a great help in class with the other students. I think we have a future teacher here. I'm proud, because it is the Noblest Profession, after all. I'm absolutely useless at teaching anything. Some have the ability and some don't. I don't.