one needs to have a certain level of IQ to be able to home-teach. smart parents = smart kids = good grades on the other hand, if you cram 50 kids into one class, there will be higher % failure than in a class of 20 students.
The average Joe needs a lawyer to protect himself from an out-of-control power-mad government, such as home schoolers that have their children taken from them and forcibly enrolled in crappy public schools. When the average Joe can get by without a lawyer, it will be when government has been brought to heel and that does not look like any time soon. Concerning the Foundation series by Asimov, that was ludicrously long. Fortunately, the internet has also made books obsolete. Why read an entire book or series on a subject when you can just google the parts you need?
I almost fell out of my chair when they announced he won the Nobel, I'm still in shock, thought it was a spoof by SNL
I my experience the system needs to change more than the teachers. When I was a kid they tracked classes as fast middle, slow remdial. Now they mix all the kids up for P.c. liberal union reasons. It screws up the learning for all the kids. my 10 year old has a great teacher but two weeks into the year he still has not learned anything because the teacher is catching up the slow kids and the kids who do not speak english that well. It gets you sort of pissed that you kids time is being wasted by p.c. liberal clowns. You wonder if they are actually attempting to dumb down the smarter kids.
That's IF they have a parent that cares. I've seen many cases of home schooled kids who didn't learn jack. "Ahh...let's do this tomorrow." It's pretty hard for a parent to get their kids to sit in a chair for 6 hours per day studying and learning. Parents don't have the level of authority teachers, the principal, or the dean has. That being said, the education system in the US is pretty poor at the elementary level. It gets a bit better in secondary school and the US has the best universities in the world. I think it's Germany that recruits and pays the best teachers to teach K-3rd grade. That's the most important and influential time in a childs life. It sets the ground work early on. The US fails miserably at this level.
Well I suppose I am uniquely qualified to comment here since I was actually homeschooled for 6 years. Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages to it. I don't think kids should be homeschooled just to be homeschooled. There really has to be a specific reason. You certainly don't learn as well at home by yourself. I struggled a lot with things like math and science where I didn't have a teacher that was well versed in stuff like that. You are also missing basic things that schools easily offer such as knowledgeable teachers, other students to bounce things off of, gyms, sports teams, science labs, connections (meeting people) etc. On the flip side, when I went to school (K-6th) I was very good at things like math and taking tests and stuff like that. A lot of that doesn't mean much in the real world. However I did lack a sort of literary/artsy side that wasn't practiced much in school, at least the ones I went to. Things like how to write something weren't talked about much but I sure knew how to do something useless like diagram a sentence. The things I was good at or struggled in sort of flipped when I was homeschooled. I seemed to gain a little more of an ability to be independent and do things on my own rather than having to rely on others. All of you union and PC bashing people here can say what a drag our school system is but most people I know that are my age and younger are certainly book smarter than me. They all know how to do calculus and physics etc. I barely was able to pass algebra 2 immediately after high school at the community college. There are some things that are much easier to learn from a teacher than trying to learn it on your own.
The curriculum for home school is FAR better than the drivel in the public schools. The same is true for the little Christian Schools that are all over the US. I used to look forward to helping my daughter with her grammar school and junior high homework because it was so incredibly refreshing to work with materials produced by somebody that actually wanted people to learn..
Yes; Obama getting the Nobel must be the lowest it has gotten; thats for sure. Makes you think that maybe the rest of the awards are also not really going to the most worthy folks.. but just by chance or luck or whatever. But Obama getting it definitely has a certain comic element to it. Worth a chuckle. -gariki
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