Activity Feed › Discussion Forums › Education & Training › Home Schooling
Home Schooling
Posted by dave-lindell on April 3, 2020 at 12:39 amI just heard of one parent who got so frustrated she fed the math homework to the dog herself.
mathteacher replied 4 years ago 13 Members · 23 Replies- 23 Replies
My SO is an elementary teacher. Her kids have been doing just fine with remote education, given the circumstances, until the parents suddenly decide they are bored of working at home and take an interest (often for the first time) in their kids’ education. Only then does she find herself inundated with requests to explain basic concepts for the third and fourth time – not to the kids, but to the parents, who are suddenly worried because they have apparently never taught their kid any skills or concepts before, save how to turn on a tablet or phone and find YouTube.
Most of these parents are highly paid (much higher than myself and certainly my GF) to literally solve problems in the tech world, and they get flummoxed the instant they have to solve the problem of relating to their own offspring. In the fifteen years she has been teaching, she say’s it’s never been this bad and has been getting worse.
This isn’t even calculus – the most advanced concepts are fractions and noun/verb structure…
My parents may not have been the best teachers, but they could at least figure out ways to explain basic concepts to me without having their hands held by my teachers – who would never have put up with round-the-clock emails and calls from twenty-plus sets of parents, like teachers are expected to do today.
No wonder so many people think education is worthless these days.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil PostmanAnd who asks the teachers? Why do that?
YouTube. Every major curriculum seems to have someone that taught that class and put it on video. Especially the math classes.
The curriculum has a certain way it is trying to teach, and if it was new to me, I just typed in the info on the bottom of my kid’s worksheet in to the google machine…poof…someone is explaining the method, and probably the why…I think those parents lack basic research skill or are just plain lazy (and do more work as a result).
-All thoughts my own, except my typos and when I am wrong.@dmyhill Maybe the SO and the GF are two different people.
Interchangeable…SO, GF, life partner, SWMBO, etc…it’s all the same to me…this is Seattle(ish).
She just had a parent ask if she was going to spend her spring break creating extra lessons for the kids to do after they finish their allotted daily work. Her response was much more polite than mine would have been.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman@flga
I shared Ben’s note with my daughter-in-law who is schooling my 8-year-old grandson through the end of the year. He was going to call his teacher because Mom doesn’t know what skip-counting is.
I thought I knew that one. It’s when you count the ones you skipped ’cause you couldn’t do them, or so I thought.
But I was wrong.
- Posted by: @mathteacher
skip-counting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_counting
In older textbooks, this technique is called counting by twos (threes, fours, etc.). … Combining the base (two, in this example) with the number of groups (five, in this example) produces the standard multiplication equation: two multiplied by five equals ten.
I can see that as a possible way among others to help a student get the concept of multiplication, but it certainly isn’t a good method to rely on for the long term.
. This morning Mrs. Cow conducted six short classes via Zoom. In one group of Seventh Grade students she had three students who were still in bed but logged on. She told them to sit up in bed. Two complied. The third laid back down and within two minutes was sound asleep. She called out to her three times and received no response so she deleted her from the group session. About 15 minutes the student and the student’s mother buzzed in so she let them in to the session. That was a mistake. Mama and little darling merely wanted to chew her butt for shutting little darling off earlier. This, unfortunately, is what you get with certain families.
I do not consider myself unusually smart, but I’m pretty sure that I could have learned what I did in public school in about 1/4 the time it took if I had been allowed to work at my own pace. Unless you include learning to duck and cover to be learning.
I never could teach any of my kids (who are now all in their 30s) math, although I consider myself fairly good at it. The reason, I think, is that the way it was being taught was completely different from the way I was taught.
Today I asked my DIL how the home schooling was going with my 2 grandsons. This is day 3.
She said today two students were expelled for fighting and one teacher was fired for drinking on the job…
Every student has their own story about home schooling.
In the past, home schooling was done in their home and a parent oversaw the study and performance.
Many did well and others did almost none of their studies.
What was common was that many had no social life skills at all.
Now with online twoway video conferences, I can see that there will be many families that would prefer this rather than the mass migration every morning and every afternoon to get students to and from the schools.
0.02
One thing that I hope to see come out of this current educational dilemma is parents waking up to the struggles that their young students are actually facing in the classroom, not some combination of assumed circumstances based primarily on their own experiences 20 to 40 or more years prior. Perhaps some will realize that their child has reading problems or comprehension problems or memory problems or vision problems or hearing problems or…………………………. We, as parents, prefer to assume everything is hunkydory with our offspring. An example is a classmate of mine whose mother was an elementary teacher in our district. She had no idea he was reading at about a Third Grade level while in high school until we had a day where numerous parents were in attendance for some reason in our English classroom. He was one of several students called on to read aloud to the class from some book we were reading at the time. It was painfully obvious to all in a short time that he was not up to par with other random students. His mother worked very hard with him after that. He went on to graduate college and became a high school teacher for several years before becoming an instructor at a community college. I’m sure that would not have happened without his mother’s awakening to his weakness.
When I started school it quickly became apparent I could not comprehend what was being thrown at me. And being a shy child I merely withdrew and my poor performance worsened. There was “talk” of placing me in the special-ed class, you know…the short bus. In later years I was happy to hear children with the same sensory problems were being helped. However at that time I don’t think anyone had ever heard of the word “dyslexia”.
As it would happen my mother had endured the same conditions her whole life. Her pleadings kept me out of the “short bus class” temporarily. She worked tirelessly teaching me the ‘tricks’ she had learned over the years that had helped her adapt. It worked. I know it sounds strange, but she would make me read a page only looking at the page’s reflection in a mirror. After mastering that chore, reading by looking at the page directly seemed like a breeze. To this day I can still read a page in a mirror. I can also write upside down and backwards almost as well as I can “normally”.
I know there are a few of you all out there that have worked with me and watched me write upside-down and backwards on a lath. One helper said it so eloquently…he said, “That’s fu*ked up”. I had to agree with him, but that’s how I learned.
Saw some official statistics on school closings a few minutes ago. In the US, over 120,000 of the nearly 125,000 schools (not school districts) are closed. That is 98.3 percent of the students. There are around 800 schools that have made no changes from the norm.
This morning my 9 y o son??s 3rd grade teacher taught her math class via Zoom- she was sitting on he couch in sweatpants wearing a camouflage baseball hat….
I can do the same thing and got similar responses. I did it because I could not because of dyslexia.
I suspect that Mrs. Cow had an impulse to lock out the Rip Van Winkless altogether, but she’s too dedicated to learning to do that. But it does illustrate the problems that sites like Coursera have with completion rates.
Log in to reply.