Slashdot Mirror
Home-Schooling and "Open Source" Materials?
Deagol asks: "After we registered our daughter for second grade yesterday at public school, I began to ponder (yet again) the question of homeschooling. There's certainly not a lack of sites out there about the topic, but I was surprised at the lack of public domain materials out there. I would think there'd more collections of public domain 'courses' since the K-12 core knowledge base is so stable and well understood. Sure, there are tons of places that will sell you kits of course materials, and quite a few home-schoolers who made their own courses (but only offer them for a fee). I assume there's more than a few homeschoolers out there on Slashdot. Are there any good sources of free home-schooling materials (including software) out there?"
If you're not homeschooling a bunch of other people's money also, I mean children, and charging them money, then you're just homeschooling your own child, and nobody cares what you do. Just go into a large public library and photocopy away. Mmm-bah!
If I had kids, I would probably homeschool too, at least for the earlier years. Mailny beacuse I had bad experiances at school (maily teaching methods!).
Having thought about this for a while, and bringing up my younger brothers and sisters (i have 6 of them!) here's my thoughts.
1: decide of a few core sobjects you belive that your child should learn and search for material on those subjects.
2: Make sure that you pick a broad range of education, you don't have to go too deep into every topic/area. Include things like art, music, hand crafts, social sciences as well as the more academic subjects.
3: Find something you always wanted to learn at school and learn it with your child, you should be a quicker learner and it wil be fun for both of you.(that'd be spelling and co for me!)
4: most importantly make everything as fun as possible. Ancient history (3000 years - 300 years ago) is very easy to make into a fun subject and you don't have to worry about ofending anyone when you talk about alixander the great going on a rampage all over asia minor, or some of the stupid things they done in the crusades.
I hope it works out well, you child will probably thank you for it in the future!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
My wife has her degree in early childhood education and is a state certified teacher, but she stays at home with my son and homeschools him. I hadn't really thought about the fact that we are really laying out a fair amount of money for the materials. The state regulations in GA as I understand it are that you don't have to use a certain accredited course.. you have do certain placement testing after every 3rd grade or so (my boy is only 5 and doing 2nd grade work right now so it hasn't come up yet)... not sure on the final diploma requirements though... I'll ask the Mrs and post again....
wordtrip.com
Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/) has some of the best literature ever written, from Alice in Wonderland to Emile Zola; you can download the complete works of Mark Twain as a single zipped archive :)
...
I wonder if anyone can suggest good analogs to PG for music and / or spoken-word materials, things like classic radio broadcasts, famous speeches, audio books with appropriate licenses, etc
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
As a former special ed teacher (in elementary, but also in high school for a while), I'd first suggest you ask yourself why you want to homeschool. I've worked with a number of homeschooled students. While I find that, in many cases, they are well educated, that does not make up for the social issues I see almost all of these students develop. Homeschooled students simply do not get the myriad of opportunities to interact with peers and authority figures that they would in school. In one school the valedictorian had been homeschooled for most of his life. When he graduated, he was not emotionally ready for college, and would not have been able to handle making all the personal decisions living away from home requires. He did not know how to interact wit hthe other students who frequently laughed at his attempts to "fit in." Now that I'm in the business world, I see he is also not someone I would want to hire. While homeschooling may have helped him academically, his social skills were so poor, I could not see him interacting well with other employees or working with a team in a beneficial way. He simply did not have the experience at interacting and working with people.
While I have seen some homeschooled students do quite well, the majority I've seen (both in and out of special ed) are too much like the student I described above to be a coincidence. The parents are so thrilled Junior is thinking like them and acting the way he's been told to act, they don't see this. The few students that did well had EXTENSIVE social activities (I mean way more than non-homeschooled students had), such as playing on a soccer team AND acting in community plays AND ballet going on all at once -- which often would also lead to burnout.
On the other hand, I have another point to help. Schools go through textbook adoption in cycles. For elementary, one year they're working on Language Arts, then Math, then Science, etc. See if you can work with other parents in the area that want to homeschool. As a group go to school districts in the general area and see if you can obtain used copies of books they're discarding when they adopt new books. Do this with private schools as well.
The curriculum is not as set as the question makes it sound -- there are constant changes in elementary education (the very fact that statement was in the question leads me to ask if the person who asked the question knows enough about learning and what teachers are actually doing when they teach to be an effective teacher -- reading, for example, is not an easy subject to teach effectively). I only taught for 10 years, but the way reading and language arts was taught in that time changed enough so I would not have wanted to use textbooks available at the beginning of that time 10 years later.
There is more to school than merely learning to read and write. There are other things one learns, such as social skills, team sports etc. It seems cruel to deprive your children of the social aspects that school can provide.
In addition to helping with the various legal hurdles some states impose on home-schoolers, the HSLDA also provides a clearing house for home-schooling information.
Another group you may find interesting is k12.com, which is an internet-based classroom for homeschoolers, founded by former US Secretary of Education Bill Bennett.
It is true that you won't find a great deal of actual courses freely available. The information being taught in any course/curriculum is public domain; you're paying for the time and effort it took for someone to arrange that information for you.
However, do you need actual courses? The information you're seeking *is* out there for free. It is possible to pull together a fantastic curriculum with little effort.
One book you should immediately look at is "Homeschooling Your Child for Free." I forget the author, but you can find it on the shelf at any Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. I found a copy at my local library. It is filled with free educational resources on every subject. If there are free courses available, this book will list them.
Another useful book is "Home Education Year by Year" by Rebecca Rupp. This book will walk you through pulling your own curriculum together.
There are literally thousands of free lesson plans for teachers on the web.
All of the phonics and reading materials I use to teach our kids can be found at the library. So far all of my science material has come from the web or libraries. My kids learn handwriting from worksheets I print off the web. Most of our citizenship and art projects come off the web too.
I did purchase math and history programs, but I could easily teach those subjects using free resources as well.
Finally, go grab any books you can find by John Taylor Gatto and John Holt. Anyone who is considering homeschooling should read what they have to say about education.
~medcalf's wife
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
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I was surprised at the lack of public domain materials out there
I'm honestly not trying to troll here. But we must remember that most "stuff" makes it into the public domain because the copyright on it has lapsed. There is some good stuff out there at the college level, more or less, most of which my (cursory) examination reveals to be university or more rarely governmentally sponsered.
But my point is that I, like you, am surprised at the paucity of material. (An unrelated example: try finding simple instructions for constructing a model geodesic dome. It's out there, but not to the extent I'd expected. The best beginner-level instructions are scanned from a book that went out of print in the 1970s.)
Why is this? I think it may be that our expectations are wrong. I expect free, accurate, and complete information to easily found and painlessly obtained on the 'net.
Why do I expect this? Because I can freely, easily and painlessly download just about any sort of software I care to name, for nearly any OS I prefer to run. In the last few years, I've even come to expect a choice of a binary compiled for my system or source code that I can freely modify.
But other than software authors, who else makes their work-product available for free?
Doctors? Generally not. Lawyers? Not too often. Civil engineers? Not that I'm aware of. Authors of (non-software related) reference works? To some small extent. Authors of (saleable) fiction or music? A few.
But I can get nearly any software I care to name easily and at no or nominal cost (and hopefully someone will correct me by noting what categories of software can't be found freely -- GUI-based spellcheckers come to mind).
So who's missing the boat? Free software authors, or everyone else?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
As I said above, if you really want to make sure that your home-schooled kid gets the same social experiences he would get in a public school, you could always beat him up each morning and steal his lunch money...
They also present "real-time science" events which are lesson plans and activities based on current events or special activities. For example, they teamed with CSA to do a webcast from the International Space Station to demonstrate some physics in space and build a educational units from it.
That's why the winner of the national spelling bee was also a homeschooler?
I guess your ignorant stereotype doesn't hold up after all, now does it?
Hehee, I hadn't heard that one before. +1 Funny
include $sig;
1;
I guess your ignorant stereotype doesn't hold up after all, now does it?
That's ok. He is probably the son of some teacher's union fanatic. Wave to him the next time you see him cleaning the shitter at the local McD's.The social aspects can be obtained by getting involved with other homeschool families. The primary purpose of the school system is supposed to be education, not sports or social activities. It's funny but people always bring up the least important things about public school and claim that somehow these children will be disadvantaged because they didn't get to experience these things. "Sure, he's a moron, but he's a socially well rounded moron that feels good about himself and got to play sports". And we wonder why this country is going to hell......
This coming from an individual who was formerly home schooled, I strongly recommend you think, seriously, about going that route with your children.
The education *can* be better, depending on how motivated the parent(s) doing the educating are. And there are experiences a homeschooled child can have that are different/better than one in the public education system, simply because of the "flexible scheduling" possible. You can *go* places that relate to what you're learning, any time.
However, don't forget the social aspect of homeschooling. Homeschooling is, primarely, a religiously-based organization. In some states, they even have that chartered into the organization. Florida's primary homeschooling organization *requires* you to be a Christian to be a member. (I'm not sure of the legality of that, but that's how it is.) So, most homeschooling is done for religious reasons. And, while this has some merrit, for the most part, it defeats the whole purpose.
I was homeschooled, for said religious reasons (but no longer follow christianity, because it didn't and doesn't make any sense to me -- but that's OT.) and I was 100% unprepared when I went back to public school, for high school, after having been homeschooled grades 2-8. The point of Christianity is to exist as a "becon of light" or something of that nature, in a "world of darkness" However, when you remove the world, what's the point? You're learning only one side of the issue, and aren't prepared to defend it from attacks, if you really do believe it.
In addition, even though there exist *many* socialization groups and group classes that homeschoolers may take, 2-3 hours a day, 1-2 days a week of social contact simply cannot replace the 8 hours a day, 7 days a week contact that children in standard schooling arrangements experience. Homeschoolers, as a result (unless they have family who are not homeschooled, i.e. older siblings) lag behind in terms of social skills...Interacting with other *children* in addition to the styles of dressing and such. And by "styles" I don't mean wearing the right brands, I mean wearing clothes of the proper length and cut.
Finally, there is the social aspect. Because of the lack of social contact, over 3/4 of the homeschoolers I've met have a chronic problem with the ability to be around children their own age. Partially because of a "superiority complex" bred by their parents (You're too smart for public school...) and an inability to speak the language (slang, etc.) homeschoolers are ostracized in mixed groups.
I went through this. Everything I talked about. Now, obviously, I'm over that (and have my best friend to thank for that, for seeing through to my potential 'coolness') but unfortunately, too many parents still subject their children to it.
Another IMPORTANT issue to bring up is -- while I'm sure you, the submitter of the article, are qualified to teach your children, there are too many parents who aren't. Being knowledgable in your religion does not equate to knowledge of any other subjects -- and the best "bible teacher" of the world won't help you pass your SATs.
The socialization line is bullshit anyway. Do you interact only with people who are the exact same age as you for your entire life?
Most Home Schoolers are not really tech savvy, but a few of us are (the demographics of home schoolers track pretty closely to the general population). The thing to remember is that homeschooling offers a great deal of freedom for parents to customize their child's education. There is not even a dominant vendor of materials, mostly because the parents really value their freedom to choose. We have never used an entire curriculum from a single vendor, we might get math from one place and English from another and decide to "roll our own" on sign language. The real point is that the curriculum is "free as in speech, not free as in beer".
Homeschooling should not be considered a low-cost education (that would be public school), but rather a high-quality education. We would certainly be a lot of $$ ahead if my wife worked full time and we sent our kids to a private school. We make the choice to home school because we feel it is best for our kids. I don't believe it is the best choice universally, but it clearly is the best for some, it's largely a personality and value issue. I can tell you that when done well, the kids really shine. I am always amazed by the people who say there is no way the kids can be socialized properly. The people making those claims most vociferously are generally trying to assuage their own guilt for not home schooling (or even better to justify their membership in the NEA, a labor union, not a child advocacy group!). These people would not want to meet my kids, they are data points they'd rather ignore (pardon the obvious parental pride and chest beating - homeschool dad's are prone to that).
So, in conclusion, OSS fits perfectly with home schooling. They are, at a philosophical level, cut from the same mold. I'm proud to be a staunch advocate of both!
One such place is the Mathematics, Science and Techonology Office at the University of Illinois. Web sites like these are where you can find both static and interactive material that could be used for K-12 home schooling.
I teach and my suggestion is to use other course material/curricula as a guide. Every good, qualified teacher develops their own material to suit their style of teaching. If you rely to heavily on what some else has developed you can lose effectiveness. Judiciously use it as a guide and a base for developing your own stuff for your kid.
With that said I would like to add the other side of my $0.02 coin. We are pretty much mirror images of our parents and many of us spend a great deal of time and sometimes money trying to deprogram ourselves in order to function well as adults. Home schooling will have a tendancy make your child think like you do. Is this really what you want ?
Try not to apply an ego preservation heuristic to this where you accept only what challenges your belief system the least.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Many college professors put courses online. The lower level/remedial college courses would be excellent for junior high and high school aged children.
Here's link to an annotated, java-illustrated Eudlid's Geometry, since it's way cool, and geometry is taught as early as 8th grade in schools.
K-6 material is more difficult to find for free, I agree. Schoolhouse Technologies has a math worksheet factory that we like, available in pay, trial, and free(lite) versions. Another tool we use is StartWrite which also has a trial version. (Google can't find any pages which link to both of those sites. bummer.)
There is probably a lot of print material for the basics which has expired copyright, but is hard to find since it is so old. The historical fiction by G.A.Henty is excellent. Gutenburg has a few, and the rest are being republished at Prestonspeed Publications.
My wife selected a few links from her homeschooling bookmarks, where you can find lots of free material:
Homeschool Central - Study Resources
TeacherFeatures.com
Homeschool Support on the Internet
HomeworkCentral.com - Lesson Plans by Subject
NGA: Teaching Resources: Loan Programs
Novel Study Guides for the Classroom Teacher
Outline Maps
100 Top Map Sites
Unit Studies (huge site!)
Lesson Plans & Teacher Helps
Newton's Apple
MathWork -- Math worksheets you can create in your browser
S.C.O.R.E.
homeschooling.about.com
A to Z Home's Cool - Homeschooling Web Site
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page
http://seul.org/edu
this org has a list of learning software that works with Linux.
you might also try:
http://schoolforge.net/
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
You are so right about school being more than learning to read and write. My son (now 9+) went to public school for K-1 and then went to a private school for the first half of 2nd grade. He was successful at learning to read and write, but he was a little slow at each and had a very minor speech problem. As a consequence, the other kids made fun of him. This did wonders for his self esteem, to the point that he wouldn't even try anything new anymore.
We took him out of the private school, and started home schooling. In Alabama, you have to be in a cover school, so we joined a cover school. The cover school has meetings regularly and schedules field trips every month.
After only a year and a half, his self esteem has increased tremendously. He is learning at rate that far exceeds the public schools. He has made up the losses caused by the harassment of the other children. We have spent time working on his speech problem to the point that it is basically non-existant, and corrected a vision problem that was discovered also.
He is competing with Junior High and High School kids in a Bible knowledge competion with our church and doing very well (thus learning to work with a team). He is talking about learning to play a musical instrument, and is talking about going back to either public or private school in Junior High.
He hasn't been deprived of any positive social aspects. He is in scouts, still stays in contact with a few friends from his public and private school days, and is very active in church activities. He is also active in Karate and has progressed very rapidly at that. He has managed a promotion of one belt level every three months for the last year and a half (he uses that as some of his PE in home-schooling) and is now in an advanced class. Yes, he is protected from the bullies that would beat him up and steal his lunch money, and from the kids that would make fun of him. But don't we want to encourage success and not failure in our kids?
So in short, if home schooling is warping my son, I wish there were more warped kids in this world! My daughter is also being warped. She will be 4 this fall and is starting to read because she "goes to school" with her older brother. That pretty unusual these days especially with second or later children.
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
Well, Cliff,
There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you'll have to do some editing. As somebody who grew up around teachers and has worked in textbook publishing I can assure you that teachers all have to do it too. Their stuff sucks far worse than anything referenced here.
While Project Gutenberg is great, you should also check out on-line encyclopedias like NuPedia, and Everything2 which are all open source, as is The Open Directory Project . A great source of fiction, which can be a wonderful learning tool, is Baen Books who have put hundreds of book online and are eager to have them downloaded and spread around.
For science materials, there are lots of great sites for kids done by educators pursuing whever they're into. All of which you'll want to use to spice up access to sites like Science Daily that are handy but a bit too serious some days for young minds.
Which brings me to Make Stuff which should fill in quite nicely for the "arts and crafts" part of most school curricula.
For biography I'ld check out American National Biography and for history a good start can be made with pages like Anyday which can be amazing or useless, all based on where *you* go from the starting point that they provide. Places like Colonial America are designed just for this but again, check out more than one.
For reference material you should check out Theodora which, while not meant to be open source, is very handy, Geographic.Org, which is open source and student-oriented, should do the rest. I've found that the CIA sourcebook is terrible, as folk should have long since figured out. Biased, misinformed, and sometimes just wierd; leave it behind. However if you hunt you'll find that within various.gov sites there's tons of great stuff, from manuals on camping to stuff on solar panels.
The space science community is very kid friendly, from NASA down to the local Mars Society chapter, having plenty of materials on quite a range of topics that you're free to reproduce and spread around. If you can handle it, the neopagan community is reliably eager to provide information and links on ancient indo-european history, from the government of Sumeria, to Celtic ironwork. (You might be surprised at how many neopagans have advanced degrees in history and/or literature.)
Speaking of limits, you'll always have to be careful that your kids aren't ending up places they shouldn't be but again, every teacher and librarian faces that one.
Lastly, the reason that I've got all this ready to hand is that I took it from my source database, more of which can be found on my web site, which is primarily oriented towards adults and older kids but does have plenty of other links like the ones here.
Best of luck to you and be sure to post back to slashdot in a few years about how it's going.
Rustin H. Wright - Information Geek
"It's all about the information, Marty. Little ones and zeros!"
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
I don't understand why you think you would need anything more. A TV is the only teacher your kids will need and it will leave you plenty of free time. As for those whining about the lack of social interaction when students are homeschooled; puhlease.. they will learn everything they need to know from the masters on the TV. The only problem might the be lack of physical activity but this is easily remedied with a gaming console.
the Earth Edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy makes a nice reference and project site, and a very fitting memorial.
Of course, this article shows that certain members of the educational IT establishment aren't too keen on the idea of providing quality learning materials free of charge.
Good to know that some people with access to resources realise the need to supplement what's available in schools and don't have shareholders and profits to worry about.
Two words for your son. Tough Shit. You don't take your kid out of that situation just because the other kids were making fun of him. This is life. Life is hard. Both my siblings had/have moderate to serious learning and speech problems. My parents were told one of them would not graduate high school. She now has a Masters degree and teaches. Have your kid stick through it and deal with his problems. It'll suck bad, but he'll be better for it in the end. He will be able to deal with problems that inevitably happen in real life. My other sibling also leads a successfull life and has a BS in physics.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Then again, maybe it would be better to be an 18 year old making love to a tight little 13 year old. Suckling her firm, budding breasts, taking each one entirely into my mouth as she moans at the feeling of my lips on her nipples. Running my hands up and down her back expressing my passion for her, massaging her shoulders, sliding my fingers down her sides. Gripping her buttocks while I run my tongue in and out of her bellybutton, doing figure eights on her stomach; slowly working my way down towards her delicious, hairless, virgin cunt.
Which would be more enjoyable, being a 13 year old guy at college, or being 18 and meeting the 13 year old female college freshman? Talk amongst yourselves.
Homeschooling has lots of advantages, especially ... this is an investment in the
/ BioBookTOC.html
v iew/index.html
if the children can be networked with others
who are pursuing the same path. Take, with a
grain of salt, the comments which lump all
homeschoolers together. As mentioned elsewhere,
there are many reasons to homeschool, but expect
to pay much more than you would for a "public"
education
children. I have three children who have never
attended "real" school (eldest is 14).
One of the neat things about homeschooling, if
you have a technical bent, is that you can
really work together *with* your child to solve
a tricky problem. You are much more engaged in
the whole process. And they get to share a
dynamic and passionate side of your personality.
There are plenty of engineering, space, biology,
programming, and math puzzles/contest/investigations available
for free.
My only meaningful contribution to this thread
is the following: the "good stuff" is more
plentiful as your children become more advanced.
o Online biology text book. Neat. http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/BIOBK
o Look at the recently discontinued QX3+ USB
microscope on EBay. This is billed as a toy,
but actually is a really sophisticated
microscope camera that directly attaches
to your computer. Lots of neat material
about it are to be found at http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/optics/intelplay/live
Good luck with things.
Ken
I sell through Half.Com and I've had a few hints that some of the textbooks (and other nonfiction) are being bought by home schoolers. All that Half tells me is the address to ship to, so I'm just using my imagination and don't really have any facts...other than user names which are abbreviations of "home schooling".
You mentioned Gatto and Holt. Gatto's books are new, so there aren't many on Half. Some of Holt's are classics in Education; I also have a few in stock (actually one I had bought ten years ago for my own reading about human learning). But I'm just reminding you of online bookstores as a source, so I'm not identifying myself so you can't go buy from me. I've found enough obscure and specialized books that I see why there's such a variety when thousands are listing their discoveries. But I'd have a hard time mentioning a book in my stock which isn't being offered by at least six others.
He is competing with Junior High and High School kids in a Bible knowledge competion
And I'm sure God will help him when it comes time for doing algebra, physics, and the ACT/SAT.
And when he's punding nails as a carpenter, he can be just like jeebus.
http://www.marcopolo-education.org
The MarcoPolo program provides no-cost, standards-based Internet content for the K-12 teacher and classroom, developed by the nation's content experts. Online resources include panel-reviewed links to top sites in many disciplines, professionally developed lesson plans, classroom activities and materials to help with daily classroom planning, and powerful search engines.
Done by the experts -- geography by national geographic, arts by the kennedy center....
Ooh boy. A spelling bee! Back when I was in school (almost entirely in highly selective schools) spelling bees were the turf of the poorly socialized shallow thinkers who thought that rote memorization was the same as analysis.
Mmmm-mm. Yep, that's the kind of skills students need these days.
Thanks for so effectively making the case that home schooling has socialization problems. Oh, I forgot. you don't need to actually think. You leave that up to Jeebus.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Of course, the fact that a homeschooler beat out kids five years older than him to win the national geography bee is just one example of what study after study has shown -- the fact that on average homeschoolers perform several years above grade average in every area of the curriculum.
Against this, you have what counter-argument to make? That home schoolers are missing out on enforced conformity, clicques, bullying, and all the other `vital social experiences' enjoyed by public school children? Thanks, but I (and my children) will pass...
Thanks, I'll pass...
Point taken, but neither is hiding them away from real life the answer.
Homeschoolers still socialize with other children in a wide range of settings, just not in the artificial (and disastrously mismanaged) setting of a public school. Conversely, parents of public school children who are intent on isolating their children will still do so.
Tying isolation of children to homeschooling is particularly misguided in the internet age, where internet sites make it very easy for homeschooling parents to plan field trips, group activities, and likesuch with other homeschooling parents in their area.
Thanks AC, it appears that you are genuinely concerned (NOT!!!). The mention of this was simply to go along with the learning to work on a team, and to work with people of differing skill levels. He obviously doesn't have to skills of a person of 6th-12th grade, but they feel that he is a valuable member of the team and he pulls his share of the load.
You simply had to make a negative statement given that I used a religous example here. Well, I will be perfectly happy if he wants to make his life by "punding nails as a carpentar", because at least he will be able to spell "POUNDING", and BTW he is performing at like an 8th grader taking the 3rd grade test in mathematics (California Achievement Test), and is studying geometry and physics in school this year.
He is also a fan of military history, world history, and many other subjects. He is likely a much more well rounded student than any fourth grader in public or private schools.
In short, I will be contributing some software to the educational arena soon. I will be starting to write some stuff in the next few days and will release as soon as possible. My wife and I are already determining what she needs for school this year.
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
Maybe you don't but I DID and I WOULD DO IT AGAIN. I understand what you are saying about real life and so does my son. He doesn't succeed at everything, but this isn't an environment where life is artificially hard either.
I am happy that your siblings have succeeded, that is a credit to them and your parents. I have friends that feel the same way you feel, and have children that are succeeding in the public school environment despite their problems. I am also a trained educator and I know that what was happening to my son in the normally accepted school scenerios, was not helping him in any way. It took much discussion and many hours of talking (and praying) to make the decision to pull our son from the private school and start homeschooling. He was involved in much of that discussion as it was an important decision for his life.
I am happy that I didn't use your two words with my son. He faces the real world everyday and has opportunities that other children do not have. If you read other posts of mine you will find that he has many interests and is active in many groups with other children. He also knows that his education is partly his responsibility. He values his education.
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
Taking a child out of a difficult, but not impossible situation is hardly a good thing...they need to learn how to overcome such obstacles...
I had very serious speech deficiencies throughout elementary school...What negative attention I recieved motivated me to work harder at correcting it (along with a public school provided speech thrapist). I now talk as normally as any one else in this country and am a vocalist. If I had gone through life homeschooled, I would have had no incentive to fix this and would have been disadvantaged for the rest of my life (as these problems are harder and harder to correct with age)...
Brian
Good for you. I am happy that it worked for you. However, my son was starting to give up. It wasn't that it was difficult. Maybe posting this to SlashDot was the wrong thing to do, but I was hoping to make life a little easier on someone else that might be forced to start making the same decision. I obviously can't include everything that happened in the two and a half years that my son was in public and private schools.
My son did get speech therapy to aid him with his speech problems, and vision therapy for his vision problems. He has plenty of incentive to "fix this" as he is now driven positively instead of being driven into the ground by constant failure. Unfortunately "normal" schools are not based on positive re-enforcement, but are based on the fact that students do not want to fail. He was starting to accept failure as his lot in life.
But now with a year and a half of homeschooling, he has learned to succeed. He can handle success and failure, because he knows that both are possible. He also knows that his efforts can often affect the success or failure of some things. He has learned that some people can do some things much easier than others and that it doesn't make you any better of a person because you can do certain things.
Also as someone else pointed out in another post, schools are an artificially harsh environment. They only teach you to deal with people of your own age, and as we all know "kids can be cruel". My son will have to deal with all sorts of problems in life, but he will most likely not have to deal with 5-8 year old kids making fun of him once he is out of elementary school. So he hasn't missed any thing important there, yet he is learning how to work with others of different ages and skills. Yes, he could be doing outside things while being in public or private schools, but it is easier to get him to try things now that he knows he can succeed if he applies himself and works at it.
You learned because you responded to the negative attention. My son was becoming the class clown because of that same negative attention. I could not stand by and see him wasted because of this. After all a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
Yes. Everyone is different. I personaly am very abnormal meaning that striving for self betterment means not being satisfied with myself even when I accomplish things...Also being a musician, I put a large value on what musical experience that school was able to offer for me. I would never be where I am now without it...
in the same sense, I hate my musical sound and really want to improve it. It's that sort of attitude that makes me work...
I realize everything isn't for everyone. I watched my cousins get practically socially destroyed by homeschooling (i.e. can't get along with ANYONE ages 6-600, much less eachother)...and have some feelings...sure they did badly initially in school for reasons similar to your son, yet by being removed from the problem (which was both teachers and students) never learned how to deal with authority or peers...
bad situation...
I'm not criticizing your parenting. You seem very well informed and I think that you truly are doing what's best for your child. I've just seen the negatives of it as well and slashdot--like vodka--loosens the tounge
Brian
Not all public schools will work with you, but many will. Find out, and take advantage of whatever they will do.
Try to get your kids in for music or Gym class, or perhaps you did poorly in math, so you should bring your kids in for math. I would be well advised to bring my kids (if I had them) in for english class. Most teachers have a set schedual, so you can your kid in at the same time every day for one class, and you get both socalization and instruction benifits.
The biggest advantage of public education is the varity of people and teaching styles the kid is exposed to. Your kids need to learn to work with people, including people they don't like. They also need to learn how to deal with the "bad" kids, that is to say no when a chance to do something wrong is offered.
Finially, don't be afraid to admit you are wrong, and give up on the whole idea. You might turn out to be a bad teacher, or you may have one kid who doesn't do well home schooled. All kids are different you might have one who shines and one who fails in home schooling. Most likely you will need to change things a little bit for each kid.
Last, beware of people like me who give advice about how to raise your kids, but don't have kids themselves. We mean well, but we don't know your kids.
Make sure what you are doing is legal. In some places, homeschooling more than a certain number of kids together is illegal. Apparently the state wants to prohibit parents working together to educate their kids collectively. Total fascist bullshit.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I asked myself the same question. I couldn't find any such thing, so I whipped up a little website and started working on the first book. I have some basic ideas for a full-blown curriculum that I intend to clean up and use to seed a wiki.
/. address above).
The main thing that I hope to do is comb public domain works to create a complete set of copyleft (FDL) course materials that support a full (written) k-12 curriculum.
I haven't really built enough of a . . . kernel to make very good use of outside help, but if someone wants to talk more email me at the address on the site (not the
-Peter
It's called the public library! I was home-schooled from grade seven on, back in the days before the Web. After a few attempts to use the available curricula, I found myself building my own by hanging out at the local library.
My approach was simple. Read everything I could find on a topic of interest. When I found an author I liked, I would follow his hot-links (bibliography) to his favourite authors and topic matter. By this method I went from general computer science to AI theory to psychology and learning styles to philosophy then back around again. Come graduation time I had pulled together a more wide ranged and comprehensive education than anything found in a set curriculum.
Hello I just want to say that in some states in the United States (WA, OR, ETC. Have homeschooling groups. They get together and are a way to support and help each other out. I was homeschooled in WA state. In the state there was groups called REACH. Reach-East was the the part that my mom was a part of. They had people that would help you start your own format of schooling from helping you get the right books to how to grade papers. Also they would help you get the WA state required tests to show you were doing the job correctly. I have just finished AA degree and becuase of homeschooling most of my AA in Networking Systems. I did not have to study. I learned what I needed ahead of the degree at home. This is beause I had an Idea of what I wanted to do. Since I was homeschooled, more people are doing more and more homeschooling and ther are more homeschooling Groups.
ooooohhhh when they biTe they bITe hard.
He he I laugh at you and your Foolish little mind. I wish I coUld get that worked up, it would be niCe to taKe the top of your skull just to see if there's Anything inside.
You do caRe so much, ever conSider care in the comunity?
Are you winding me up, or am I winding you up. It just seems sooooo much easier to do it from my side of the fence!!! he he he he.
been fishing latley?
I watched my cousins get practically socially destroyed by homeschooling
This sounds like a friend of mine. He was pulled out of school at one point, and homeschooled. However, I think the transition wasn't handled well. It wasn't the homeschooling, it was the feelings engendered by the massive change that weren't dealt with.
BTW, he is fine now.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
I am an unschooler, now 22 and married to a wonderful man who happens to read Slashdot and keeps me informed about interesting conversation threads. I thought it might be useful (and, I hope, not intrusive) to post an essay that I wrote about homeschooling... For as long as I can remember, I've felt like everyone and her second cousin is waiting to see how I'll turn out. I was the oldest of five children, the oldest in the homeschooling group, and one of the oldest in the secular homeschooling movement in general. "How will you get into college without school?" strangers asked me over and over, sounding like a broken record. "How will you get a job?" asked my grandmother despairingly. "What if she's socially inept?" disapproving friends insinuated to my mother. Sometimes it seemed like literally 99% of the people I met doubted that I would survive my upbringing. "You can't learn anything outside of school." "You won't have friends." "You won't know math." "You're overprotected by your parents." "You're underprotected by your parents." "You'll have to work at McDonalds." "You won't learn how to take care of yourself--it's a cruel world out there." "STOP IT! BE QUIET!" I'd often want to scream in response to thoughtless comments, but I never did. I listened to the cool interrogations a million times, watched the faces of strangers who didn't know how much their insensitivity affected the child in front of them. My voice would falter after explaining my educational philosophy a hundred times without getting through to anyone. "If it's so hard to understand, then maybe homeschooling is all wrong," I would start thinking. But deep inside myself, even in the throes of self-doubt, I knew that allowing me to stay home was the most wonderful gift my parents ever gave me. When all the other five-year-olds in my neighborhood boarded a school bus for the first time, I continued to have tea parties with my dolls, play hide and seek with my brother, and create elaborate works of art from construction paper. That was the year when Mom and Dad decided to homeschool me, although I was unaware in early September 1984 that my life was taking a different path from the lives of almost every other five-year-old in America. As the years passed, I realized that people my age usually sat inside a building called "school" for most of the day, but it was a reality far removed from my own life. I never had lessons or tests; my parents allowed me to decide what, how and when I wanted to learn. Sometimes I said that we "homeschooled." Sometimes I called it "self-directed learning." But mainly I called it my Life, and in my mind I didn't separate academic subjects from any other interest or hobby I had. The aforementioned skeptics said it wouldn't work. Friends and strangers were convinced that I would have no math skills, no employment opportunities, no knowledge of literature, and that I would turn out to be a social misfit. Concerned aunts said my parents really should make me write something--thank-you notes were still my main literary accomplishment at age 12--and that I should overcome my shyness already. But my mom and dad told them all, "She'll learn when she's ready, and she'll learn best when she needs or wants to know something." A baby learns to walk and talk because she wants to be a part of her society, they reasoned--why should a desire to learn stop there? It wasn't until I was fourteen that I wrote my first essay; later in the year, I slipped free of my shyness and traveled to Alaska alone to visit a homeschooling family whom I'd never met. Three years later, I'd had articles published in our local newspaper and my stories had won awards from Cricket magazine, and I was planning a solo six-month bike tour. People started telling my parents that I was too young to be so independent. My parents were up against a lot when they made the then-revolutionary choice to keep me out of school. At the beginning, our "homeschooling group" consisted of my mom, my brother and me, and we sat around the dining room table on Monday mornings and painted pictures while the neighborhood kids sailed off to first grade. Few people had heard of homeschooling in the early eighties, and Dad and Mom didn't know many people who could answer questions from experience. But my parents were committed to homeschooling, and looking back, I can see how they spent an incredible amount of time making sure that I could guide my own life. Mom carefully chose good books for me on our weekly library trips, but never forced me to read them. Instead, I "just happened" to find interesting books lying around. Both my parents took us camping each year on Dad's summer vacation, and we learned about geography and geysers and geology and How To Live in A Small Tent Without Killing Each Other. As we got older, my siblings and I had more autonomy than many of our peers. We went places by ourselves, stayed out as late as we wanted, and were allowed to sleep late in the mornings. But we also had more household chores and "family duties" than any of our friends; my parents made sure we learned skills to be able to handle both freedom and responsibility. If you ask twelve different homeschoolers what they do all day, you'll get twelve different answers. On one end of the spectrum are families who use boxed curriculums, hang blackboards in their dining rooms, and start lessons at 8:30--and somewhere at the other end are families like mine, who have no scheduled lessons and where the lines between "living" and "learning" become indistinguishable as parents and children go about their daily activities. Yes, during my childhood I learned to read and write and identify Australia on a world map. But also, equally important, I learned how to cook healthy meals for seven people, how to structure my time, and how to get along with my four younger siblings and my parents. I learned how to find my way around in cities I'd never been to before. I learned about making money for things I wanted, and I learned to ask myself whether the thing I wanted was worth the price of my time. Working at our local food co-op, I learned about invoices and gross vs. net sales, and I got healthy helpings of politics and economics. I had time to take in the world around me and to slowly start formulating values and ideas of my own. My seven-year-old brother's homeschooling career is markedly different from my own. As I did, L---- gets the benefit of learning and growing at his own pace--but unlike when I was younger, people don't often ask him, "Home-schooling? What's that?" They're more likely to say, "Oh, that's cool! My cousin/friend/neighbor homeschools!" And even if L---- starts getting interrogated about his education, he can flaunt some statistics. Studies in recent years have shown that homeschoolers consistently score at or above their grade level in all academic subjects. An independent study in 1998, by the director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, studied 20,760 homeschooled students' achievement test scores and their family demographics. Results demonstrated that on average, homeschoolers in grades 1-4 perform one grade level higher than their public and private school counterparts. The achievement gap begins to widen in grade 5, and by 8th grade, the average homeschooler performs four grade levels above the national average. Additionally, the ERIC study found that homeschooled children perform well on tests regardless of whether their parents are certified to teach. (i.) I wish I'd had those figures to flash when I was younger. L---- has more homeschooled playmates than I ever had. There are now three homeschooling groups in my hometown, there's a homeschooler's soccer team, and countless field trips and classes and get-togethers. Nobody knows for sure, but researchers generally place the number of homeschoolers in the United States between 600,000 and well over one million. (Not all states require homeschoolers to register at a central location; in states where such figures are available, the number of homeschoolers has grown substantially over the past ten or fifteen years.) A study conducted in 1997 by the president of the National Home Education Research Institute estimated that the number of homeschooled children in America exceeds 1.23 million. That number surpasses the total public school enrollment for the state of New Jersey, which has the 10th largest student population in the nation. That means, in other words, that there are more homeschoolers nationwide than there are public school students in Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana, and Hawaii -- combined. (ii.) Homeschoolers (including many of my friends) have also made inroads in the area of higher education. Homeschoolers have enrolled in community colleges and small private liberal arts schools, as well as Stanford and Harvard and MIT. Many colleges and universities have started developing new standards for evaluating less conventional academic records, and some are actively seeking out homeschoolers, who tend to be self-motivated and enthusiastic students. So, statistics aside, now you can ask, "How did Sara Turn Out, after all?" I guess I'm only just starting to figure it out. In 1996, I decided that I wanted to test myself, and to learn in ways that I just couldn't when I was ensconced in the comfort of home. And so I decided to ride my bicycle across America, alone. In a way, it was my "graduation"--from living as a child at home, and from the time when everyone I met asked me what grade I was in. I left the East Coast in March of 1997, when I was seventeen, and I reached Oregon in late August. On my gray Panasonic bicycle I pushed myself harder than I ever had before. I met dozens of people every week--was I the same person who had been shy about talking with strangers only three years before? I found my emotional limits of joy and fear and love and loneliness--and I pushed past them. I found that I could take the freedom I'd always had as far as I dared. Midway through the trip, in Carbondale, Illinois, J---- literally rode into my life. He and his friend W---- were also pedaling cross-country, and, excited to meet other cyclists, we decided to ride together for a couple of days. Even after we ended up riding a thousand miles together, J---- and I had no idea that a year later we would be in love--or that five years after our trip was over, we would celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Now, on a sunny August afternoon, I sit at the computer in J----'s and my apartment. We moved here together in January 2000, and J---- got a job as a web developer at a very cool local museum. I've recently started a personal chef service. I've chosen not to go to college for now, but homeschooling will never be over. My relatives are anxiously waiting to see how I've Turned Out, but really, it's an ongoing process, this business of learning and growing and being free. It's the process of self-discovery, the awareness of other people and the earth, the act of challenging perceived limitations, and finding a place in this sometimes-crazy world. Resources: Books- Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (Lowry House, 1991) John Holt, Teach Your Own and many other titles David & Micki Colfax, Homeschooling for Excellence (Warner Books, 1988) Linda Dobson, The Homeschooling Book of Answers (Prima Publishing, 1999) David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992) Herbert Kohl, The Question is College Magazines- Life Learning Magazine Box 112, Niagara Falls NY 14304-0112 USA; (800) 215-9574; or (Canada) Box 340, St. George ON N0E 1N0 Canada; website: http://www.lifelearningmagazine.com/ Home Education Magazine, P.O. Box 1083, Tonasket, WA 98855; (800) 236-3278; website: http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/ Websites- Jon's Homeschool Resource Page, http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/index.html Family Unschoolers Network, http://www.unschooling.org Not Back to School Camp http://www.nbtsc.org i. The Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, Ph.D. Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation. The study examined data on homeschoolers in grades K-12. ii. Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America, 1997, Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute. The study was based on data collected on 5,402 homeschooled students from 1,657 families.
For as long as I can remember, I've felt like everyone and her second cousin is waiting to see how I'll turn out. I was the oldest of five children, the oldest in the homeschooling group, and one of the oldest in the secular homeschooling movement in general. "How will you get into college without school?" strangers asked me over and over, sounding like a broken record. "How will you get a job?" asked my grandmother despairingly. "What if she's socially inept?" disapproving friends insinuated to my mother. Sometimes it seemed like literally 99% of the people I met doubted that I would survive my upbringing.
"You can't learn anything outside of school."
"You won't have friends."
"You won't know math."
"You're overprotected by your parents."
"You're underprotected by your parents."
"You'll have to work at McDonalds."
"You won't learn how to take care of yourself--it's a cruel world out there."
"STOP IT! BE QUIET!" I'd often want to scream in response to thoughtless comments, but I never did. I listened to the cool interrogations a million times, watched the faces of strangers who didn't know how much their insensitivity affected the child in front of them. My voice would falter after explaining my educational philosophy a hundred times without getting through to anyone. "If it's so hard to understand, then maybe homeschooling is all wrong," I would start thinking.
But deep inside myself, even in the throes of self-doubt, I knew that allowing me to stay home was the most wonderful gift my parents ever gave me.
When all the other five-year-olds in my neighborhood boarded a school bus for the first time, I continued to have tea parties with my dolls, play hide and seek with my brother, and create elaborate works of art from construction paper. That was the year when Mom and Dad decided to homeschool me, although I was unaware in early September 1984 that my life was taking a different path from the lives of almost every other five-year-old in America.
As the years passed, I realized that people my age usually sat inside a building called "school" for most of the day, but it was a reality far removed from my own life. I never had lessons or tests; my parents allowed me to decide what, how and when I wanted to learn. Sometimes I said that we "homeschooled." Sometimes I called it "self-directed learning." But mainly I called it my Life, and in my mind I didn't separate academic subjects from any other interest or hobby I had.
The aforementioned skeptics said it wouldn't work. Friends and strangers were convinced that I would have no math skills, no employment opportunities, no knowledge of literature, and that I would turn out to be a social misfit. Concerned aunts said my parents really should make me write something--thank-you notes were still my main literary accomplishment at age 12--and that I should overcome my shyness already. But my mom and dad told them all, "She'll learn when she's ready, and she'll learn best when she needs or wants to know something." A baby learns to walk and talk because she wants to be a part of her society, they reasoned--why should a desire to learn stop there? It wasn't until I was fourteen that I wrote my first essay; later in the year, I slipped free of my shyness and traveled to Alaska alone to visit a homeschooling family whom I'd never met. Three years later, I'd had articles published in our local newspaper and my stories had won awards from Cricket magazine, and I was planning a solo six-month bike tour.
People started telling my parents that I was too young to be so independent.
My parents were up against a lot when they made the then-revolutionary choice to keep me out of school. At the beginning, our "homeschooling group" consisted of my mom, my brother and me, and we sat around the dining room table on Monday mornings and painted pictures while the neighborhood kids sailed off to first grade. Few people had heard of homeschooling in the early eighties, and Dad and Mom didn't know many people who could answer questions from experience.
But my parents were committed to homeschooling, and looking back, I can see how they spent an incredible amount of time making sure that I could guide my own life. Mom carefully chose good books for me on our weekly library trips, but never forced me to read them. Instead, I "just happened" to find interesting books lying around. Both my parents took us camping each year on Dad's summer vacation, and we learned about geography and geysers and geology and How To Live in A Small Tent Without Killing Each Other.
As we got older, my siblings and I had more autonomy than many of our peers. We went places by ourselves, stayed out as late as we wanted, and were allowed to sleep late in the mornings. But we also had more household chores and "family duties" than any of our friends; my parents made sure we learned skills to be able to handle both freedom and responsibility.
If you ask twelve different homeschoolers what they do all day, you'll get twelve different answers. On one end of the spectrum are families who use boxed curriculums, hang blackboards in their dining rooms, and start lessons at 8:30--and somewhere at the other end are families like mine, who have no scheduled lessons and where the lines between "living" and "learning" become indistinguishable as parents and children go about their daily activities.
Yes, during my childhood I learned to read and write and identify Australia on a world map. But also, equally important, I learned how to cook healthy meals for seven people, how to structure my time, and how to get along with my four younger siblings and my parents. I learned how to find my way around in cities I'd never been to before. I learned about making money for things I wanted, and I learned to ask myself whether the thing I wanted was worth the price of my time. Working at our local food co-op, I learned about invoices and gross vs. net sales, and I got healthy helpings of politics and economics. I had time to take in the world around me and to slowly start formulating values and ideas of my own.
My seven-year-old brother's homeschooling career is markedly different from my own. As I did, L---- gets the benefit of learning and growing at his own pace--but unlike when I was younger, people don't often ask him, "Home-schooling? What's that?" They're more likely to say, "Oh, that's cool! My cousin/friend/neighbor homeschools!" And even if L---- starts getting interrogated about his education, he can flaunt some statistics. Studies in recent years have shown that homeschoolers consistently score at or above their grade level in all academic subjects. An independent study in 1998, by the director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, studied 20,760 homeschooled students' achievement test scores and their family demographics. Results demonstrated that on average, homeschoolers in grades 1-4 perform one grade level higher than their public and private school counterparts. The achievement gap begins to widen in grade 5, and by 8th grade, the average homeschooler performs four grade levels above the national average. Additionally, the ERIC study found that homeschooled children perform well on tests regardless of whether their parents are certified to teach. (i.) I wish I'd had those figures to flash when I was younger.
L---- has more homeschooled playmates than I ever had. There are now three homeschooling groups in my hometown, there's a homeschooler's soccer team, and countless field trips and classes and get-togethers. Nobody knows for sure, but researchers generally place the number of homeschoolers in the United States between 600,000 and well over one million. (Not all states require homeschoolers to register at a central location; in states where such figures are available, the number of homeschoolers has grown substantially over the past ten or fifteen years.) A study conducted in 1997 by the president of the National Home Education Research Institute estimated that the number of homeschooled children in America exceeds 1.23 million. That number surpasses the total public school enrollment for the state of New Jersey, which has the 10th largest student population in the nation. That means, in other words, that there are more homeschoolers nationwide than there are public school students in Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana, and Hawaii -- combined. (ii.)
Homeschoolers (including many of my friends) have also made inroads in the area of higher education. Homeschoolers have enrolled in community colleges and small private liberal arts schools, as well as Stanford and Harvard and MIT. Many colleges and universities have started developing new standards for evaluating less conventional academic records, and some are actively seeking out homeschoolers, who tend to be self-motivated and enthusiastic students.
So, statistics aside, now you can ask, "How did Sara Turn Out, after all?"
I guess I'm only just starting to figure it out. In 1996, I decided that I wanted to test myself, and to learn in ways that I just couldn't when I was ensconced in the comfort of home. And so I decided to ride my bicycle across America, alone. In a way, it was my "graduation"--from living as a child at home, and from the time when everyone I met asked me what grade I was in. I left the East Coast in March of 1997, when I was seventeen, and I reached Oregon in late August. On my gray Panasonic bicycle I pushed myself harder than I ever had before. I met dozens of people every week--was I the same person who had been shy about talking with strangers only three years before? I found my emotional limits of joy and fear and love and loneliness--and I pushed past them. I found that I could take the freedom I'd always had as far as I dared.
Midway through the trip, in Carbondale, Illinois, J---- literally rode into my life. He and his friend W---- were also pedaling cross-country, and, excited to meet other cyclists, we decided to ride together for a couple of days. Even after we ended up riding a thousand miles together, J---- and I had no idea that a year later we would be in love--or that five years after our trip was over, we would celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Now, on a sunny August afternoon, I sit at the computer in J----'s and my apartment. We moved here together in January 2000, and J---- got a job as a web developer at a very cool local museum. I've recently started a personal chef service. I've chosen not to go to college for now, but homeschooling will never be over.
My relatives are anxiously waiting to see how I've Turned Out, but really, it's an ongoing process, this business of learning and growing and being free. It's the process of self-discovery, the awareness of other people and the earth, the act of challenging perceived limitations, and finding a place in this sometimes-crazy world.
Resources:
Books-
Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (Lowry House, 1991)
John Holt, Teach Your Own and many other titles David & Micki Colfax, Homeschooling for Excellence (Warner Books, 1988)
Linda Dobson, The Homeschooling Book of Answers (Prima Publishing, 1999)
David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992)
Herbert Kohl, The Question is College
Magazines-
Life Learning Magazine
Box 112, Niagara Falls NY 14304-0112 USA; (800) 215-9574; or (Canada) Box 340, St. George ON N0E 1N0 Canada; website: http://www.lifelearningmagazine.com/
Home Education Magazine, P.O. Box 1083, Tonasket, WA 98855; (800) 236-3278; website: http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/
Websites-
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page, http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/index.html
Family Unschoolers Network, http://www.unschooling.org
Not Back to School Camp http://www.nbtsc.org
i. The Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, Ph.D. Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation. The study examined data on homeschoolers in grades K-12.
ii. Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America, 1997, Dr. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute. The study was based on data collected on 5,402 homeschooled students from 1,657 families.