There’s a big difference between someone who’s studied and practiced teaching a given subject and explaining it in a way that kids will understand, and a parent who knows only what they have read in the textbook.
And in a school, it’s not “1 teacher” - a kid will have a team of teachers, each with their own speciality. I think my English teacher would have done a pretty dodgy job if she’d had to teach us chemistry or biology.
My mother/teacher was a product of our public school system and I have no idea how good of a student she was, but it didn’t matter because she had this amazing Christ-inspired curriculum that did all the work for her.
I’m not sure how typical my experience was, but for my mom, she was more drawn to the philosophical idea of home schooling and controlling what your children learn than the actual learning work.
In my family, we had bible together in the morning, and then broke to our separate rooms to work on math, social studies, science, etc.
A few things to note:
Nobody but my mom checked our work - there was no equivalence or state testing. I mean I’m sure there was in our state but we didn’t participate
My mom isn’t very smart and really didn’t have the energy to hound us to do our work anyway. We would get yelled at for not doing our assignments but again, more for the fact of disobeying here - the education itself wasn’t really important
Pretty much our entire curriculum was Abeka, which is a garbage curriculum designed to substitute Christianity for actual learning
It won’t surprise you to learn that neither me nor any of my siblings went to college.
When I got my first real job, I was very gently informed that the “diploma” I had presented, which my dad had printed out of an MS word template, was not a valid document. Subsequently I had to quickly get a GED - which was the first and only time I’ve ever had any kind of sense of my actual education level compared to any kind of standard.
I still don’t have a confident answer to what Algebra is. At one point not long ago, I was putting together a somewhat complex formula in Excel and I wondered to myself, is this algebra?
I still genuinely don’t know, in case anyone wants to elucidate.
Algebra is doing maths with unknown values. Things like 3 x A = 6
Where A is “something we dont know yet” - so “3 times something is 6”
In this case I think perhaps we can see that A should be 2, but we can steadily learn techniques to solve more and more complicated puzzles like this.
If you get really good at these sorts of puzzles, you can learn to turn a lot of real world problem into this sort of puzzle, and often you can learn things about the problem by looking at the maths.
We can use this to calculate all sorts of stuff, and its a base of a lot of maths that comes later which is used for basically all science, engineering, accounting, programming etc.
Without getting into the abstract definition, algebra is basically just arithmetic (“regular math”) using variables (like “x”) to represent unknown values. Typically you’re trying to find a value (a regular number) or an expression (a relationship between values and variables) equal to your variable.
When you “solve for x”, you’re doing algebra. If your Excel formulas reference cells as variables (e.g. “=A1*3”) then yes that is algebra, since the cell can take different values.
Thanks for sharing!
This was essentially my experience growing up, I am old now and never bounced back fully in math either.
I was the oldest of 8, so much of my time was helping my siblings with schoolwork on top of my own “self learning”
Problem is most of our family is nerodivergent, undiagnosed until adulthood… So you know none of us got the help we needed either. Another flaw in homeschooling as you dont have people trained to pick up dyslexia early, so kids struggle too much.
Your comment helped me feel that someone out there understands, thanks! :)
For me the most devastating part of homeschooling was the lack of opportunity to interact with peers and learn basic social skills/norms/etc.
I’ve been an adult over a decade now and to this day I haven’t made up for those formative years of cognitive/social development. I likely never can because the neuroplasticity of a 30+ y.o. is wayy different from that of a single-digit’s. But also because I was always “weird,” I never made friends, so I never got to practice the social skills that I missed, and was never able to catch up in any meaningful way, so the cycles of isolation compound on themselves.
I’m completely dysfunctional and maladapted as an adult, and since everyone blames me personally for my shortcomings, I’ve found it easiest to retreat even further into isolation. At this point I’m basically a shut-in. I used to try really hard “push through” and be a part of society, as if effort alone would ever be enough. I tried persevering in the face of ridicule, but ultimately my efforts only ever got me ridiculed and derided even harder.
At this point I’ve accepted my bitter fate, and strangely over the past year I’ve found a sense of peace like I’ve never known before. I’m still isolated, maladapted, and dysfunctional, but I’ve finally learned to be okay with that. Not that I would recommend this to anybody, but if there had been literally any other option available to me, I would have chosen that instead.
Literally nobody understands that they didn’t get their social intuition from birth, and that people don’t just magically come pre-packaged with that. So they think it’s absurd when I claim I don’t have that/don’t understand it. So they blame me when I don’t “just get it” when “it” seems so obvious to every “normal” person, apparently.
My twenties were a living hell. Even now I’m dead inside. The peace I feel now is the peace of the grave, and I resisted it every step of the way.
Folks, if you don’t hate your children, then say no to homeschooling.
“Teacher” seems to be a flexible term here.
There’s a big difference between someone who’s studied and practiced teaching a given subject and explaining it in a way that kids will understand, and a parent who knows only what they have read in the textbook.
And in a school, it’s not “1 teacher” - a kid will have a team of teachers, each with their own speciality. I think my English teacher would have done a pretty dodgy job if she’d had to teach us chemistry or biology.
My mother/teacher was a product of our public school system and I have no idea how good of a student she was, but it didn’t matter because she had this amazing Christ-inspired curriculum that did all the work for her.
I’m not sure how typical my experience was, but for my mom, she was more drawn to the philosophical idea of home schooling and controlling what your children learn than the actual learning work.
In my family, we had bible together in the morning, and then broke to our separate rooms to work on math, social studies, science, etc.
A few things to note:
It won’t surprise you to learn that neither me nor any of my siblings went to college.
When I got my first real job, I was very gently informed that the “diploma” I had presented, which my dad had printed out of an MS word template, was not a valid document. Subsequently I had to quickly get a GED - which was the first and only time I’ve ever had any kind of sense of my actual education level compared to any kind of standard.
I still don’t have a confident answer to what Algebra is. At one point not long ago, I was putting together a somewhat complex formula in Excel and I wondered to myself, is this algebra?
I still genuinely don’t know, in case anyone wants to elucidate.
Simplest way you do algebra - item costs $5, you give the cashier $10, how much do you get back?
I’m sorry to hear about your upbringing. It must have been tough to adjust to adulthood.
Algebra is doing maths with unknown values. Things like 3 x A = 6 Where A is “something we dont know yet” - so “3 times something is 6”
In this case I think perhaps we can see that A should be 2, but we can steadily learn techniques to solve more and more complicated puzzles like this.
If you get really good at these sorts of puzzles, you can learn to turn a lot of real world problem into this sort of puzzle, and often you can learn things about the problem by looking at the maths.
We can use this to calculate all sorts of stuff, and its a base of a lot of maths that comes later which is used for basically all science, engineering, accounting, programming etc.
Without getting into the abstract definition, algebra is basically just arithmetic (“regular math”) using variables (like “x”) to represent unknown values. Typically you’re trying to find a value (a regular number) or an expression (a relationship between values and variables) equal to your variable.
When you “solve for x”, you’re doing algebra. If your Excel formulas reference cells as variables (e.g. “=A1*3”) then yes that is algebra, since the cell can take different values.
Okay yeah that’s what I was thinking - particularly the cell reference as variable. Thank you for a great explanation.
I literally worked in finance for a major company for a period of time…
Thanks for sharing! This was essentially my experience growing up, I am old now and never bounced back fully in math either.
I was the oldest of 8, so much of my time was helping my siblings with schoolwork on top of my own “self learning” Problem is most of our family is nerodivergent, undiagnosed until adulthood… So you know none of us got the help we needed either. Another flaw in homeschooling as you dont have people trained to pick up dyslexia early, so kids struggle too much.
Your comment helped me feel that someone out there understands, thanks! :)
For me the most devastating part of homeschooling was the lack of opportunity to interact with peers and learn basic social skills/norms/etc.
I’ve been an adult over a decade now and to this day I haven’t made up for those formative years of cognitive/social development. I likely never can because the neuroplasticity of a 30+ y.o. is wayy different from that of a single-digit’s. But also because I was always “weird,” I never made friends, so I never got to practice the social skills that I missed, and was never able to catch up in any meaningful way, so the cycles of isolation compound on themselves.
I’m completely dysfunctional and maladapted as an adult, and since everyone blames me personally for my shortcomings, I’ve found it easiest to retreat even further into isolation. At this point I’m basically a shut-in. I used to try really hard “push through” and be a part of society, as if effort alone would ever be enough. I tried persevering in the face of ridicule, but ultimately my efforts only ever got me ridiculed and derided even harder.
At this point I’ve accepted my bitter fate, and strangely over the past year I’ve found a sense of peace like I’ve never known before. I’m still isolated, maladapted, and dysfunctional, but I’ve finally learned to be okay with that. Not that I would recommend this to anybody, but if there had been literally any other option available to me, I would have chosen that instead.
Literally nobody understands that they didn’t get their social intuition from birth, and that people don’t just magically come pre-packaged with that. So they think it’s absurd when I claim I don’t have that/don’t understand it. So they blame me when I don’t “just get it” when “it” seems so obvious to every “normal” person, apparently.
My twenties were a living hell. Even now I’m dead inside. The peace I feel now is the peace of the grave, and I resisted it every step of the way.
Folks, if you don’t hate your children, then say no to homeschooling.
I’m a college professor and I’m not going to go around pretending to teach anything that isn’t related to my actual field.