AIBU to wonder how home educators feel confident teaching children?

[Toodledootwo]

Genuinely interested in those that home school? What do you think you can do better? Do you plan the full curriculum till 18? It is an ethos? how do you have the confidence to teach?
as an educated professional, doing training courses drains me from the stress. I have a masters in engineering but can’t possibly believe I can teach my child maths. So how do home educators have the confidence to think they can do it?

Re online resources...I'm pretty sure parents who are properly doing home ed are not just googling. There are a million websites and apps now, designed by ex teachers, subject specialists etc that have the content. BBC Bitesize as a starting point arranges info according to key stage, topics etc. Factor in groups, co-ops, tutors etc as mentioned by others plus an understanding that learning is not the same as teaching and its easy to see how it can be brilliant. That's not to say some don't use it as a way to just exit a controlling system and do nothing but there will always be, in every field, good and bad examples.

Because 'teaching' is mostly crowd control and how to teach a whole cohort of students the same thing. At home you aren't 'teaching', you are working with the child you have in front of you and as their parent i know them better than anyone. Home ed is better because school made my 8 year completely depressed, stopped talking, stopped eating, stopped socialising, he was a shadow of himself. So yes being home educated is by far the superior/better choice for him since he wasn't learning in school whilst feeling unsafe and certainly not thriving there. You can have tutors if you want, but online resources are huge, as well knowing how children actually learn through curiosity, following their interests etc. Many home educators aren't sat at the kitchen table 'teaching' their child, for most home educators its a lifestyle and not creating a 'school at home' environment.

@Toodledootwo
It’s always hence OP not hence why.

As a secondary school English teacher of 25 years, I completely agree with this. ⬆️

Teaching 20 - 30 children/ young people with varying abilities and needs is difficult and in my opinion and experience has become a lot more challenging in the last five to ten years. That is the skill. Classroom routines, behaviour management first, knowledge and actual teaching come after that in my opinion. It’s great when it all comes together. I have had some very high-achieving classes and some where learning is hindered/slowed by behaviour and SEMH issues. The teacher has to adapt within school policies. School can work very well for some/most but doesn’t work for everyone.

I don’t know much at all about home education but I can imagine that educating a small number of children is very different. I know a few families who have done it - they teach their children their own areas and skills and then use education hubs and tutors, sports clubs etc…trips out to create a well-rounded experience. It depends on the child and family circumstances, I think.

Some do that, not all. I home schooled and I did the teaching.

I home edded my son between the ages of 7 to 12.

For maths and English I was quite reliant on apps:
Reading Eggs to begin with then Night ZooKeeper for Spag and creative writing. Defenders of Mathmatica and Divided Islands for maths (both free on the BBC website)

We were lucky enough to have a maths tutor in our extended family who provided a weekly lesson for free.

He also had weekly sessions with IntoUniversity, a charity that providing academic support to kids from low income families.

For the rest, I just let him follow his interests. He got very into geography and geopolitics through countryballs. And he'd always had an interest in history.

I couldn't find a home ed history class so we made our own. DS would come up with a topic he wanted to cover and I'd try to think of a fun activity for primary ages kids.
We put the word out on the local home ed Facebook page and a bunch of kids and mums showed up.

Some of ones that went down well:

Wrapping up barbie dolls to make Egyptian mummies,
Designing a Greek city state (i had them pick a god to worship, a form of economy, a political system)
Spartan training (an adapted a version of capture the flag)
and my famous Bronze Trading Game to demonstrate how the development of bronze led to a global economy.

Other Mums in the community would organize their own clubs and events and we'd go along to them.

I will put my hands up to it being a bit humanities heavy. He got most of his science knowledge from YouTube.

I don't think it particularly mattered at primary age. I was really just looking to give him the basis skills and an interest in learning.

He's doing the standard curriculum at secondary now and doesn't seem to have been held back.

My daughter went to online school and had a maths tutor - but before you say that’s not the sort of thing you mean, I absolutely did teach her GCSE Maths too. As a result of dyscalculia and ADHD she would never remember maths concepts long-term - it was as though she had never encountered them. There were elements of the curriculum I taught her not once, but seven or eight times. This was not my choice - I would have wanted her in the special school for autistic pupils up the road, but the local authority operates a multi-year year war of attrition as a demand reduction strategy.

If you have a degree in engineering, presumably you did A Level Maths, and you are a teacher so you understand pedagogy. So of course you bloody could teach your child to GCSE. What you mean is that home educators aren’t as clever as you so how dare they presume?

But being honest on the subject for others in my position - my degree was in an arts subject but I got an A (no A* back then) in GCSE Maths. Foundation level is very
accessible if you were strong in Maths and if you can’t remember it (I guess I must have done standard form as a kid but don’t remember) you will pick it up. There are great BBC Bitesize videos and tools like Corbett Maths with great explainer videos.

I think Higher Level maths (7/8/9 level), unless you are very confident, needs a tutor.

I taught at GCSE level. Not through original choice, but through circumstance. That's when I realised how easy it really is. Teachers have to know their subject well, but they also have to follow a mandated style and follow a curriculum. That style is repeated online and in books so it's very easy to follow. I facilitated learning and any areas my child struggled with I would then learn so that I could help, but I definitely didn't need to learn everything.
I ended up loving home educating so much that I now wish I had done it sooner!

Ex teacher.

my pgce course taught me a bit about how to teach but brutally not much.

i have friends who home edd and it’s generally accepted that teaching kids to read and write and infant level maths is very do-able. There’s lots of websites and phonics schemes and even if your kid is in school you’re expected to read every day with them as a parent.

at the other end, my dd did online school for a levels and there is now so, so much online schools available particularly for GCSEs and a levels. They’re very p popular with international families who are outwith the U.K. for a few years. Lots of teens also struggle with in person school due to illness (my dd had a thyroid disorder) or anxiety/depression.

i live in Cambridge and there is a home ed co-op here, which each year offers regular classes. So for example a friend of mine who used to be a teacher offered two year class leading to gcse RE on Tuesdays 10-11. She took in kids every year.

she also offered a more general RE class for ks2/ks3 on a Thursday afternoon that was more of a drop in term by term,

so you/your kid could sign up for the courses they wanted that year/two years and learn that way.

the co-op model is quite common especially in cities of any size.

so it’s not just you teaching your kid.

Due to teacher shortages, you are assuming that subject teachers teach their subject, when they might easily not be. The teacher might just be a page or two ahead in the text book, teaching themselves.

Really? My DD is 16 and in mainstream school but realised Santa couldn’t possibly exist because he would have to travel faster than the speed of light to do what people said he did and then explained black holes to me after I took her to see a Prof Brian Cox show aged 7 (just).

She’s was growing fruit and veg in the garden with DH from toddlerhood. She’s been driving on private land since she was 12. Has learned how to use digital art apps/programmes herself. Has learned how to cook from doing it with us. Learned how to crochet with my mother. My dad explained to her how tides exist because of the moon and how planes fly. We stayed up to watch the Artemis landings and talked through the various things on screen as they happened. We’ve taken her to concerts and theatre shows and poetry readings. She’s a voracious reader in more than one language.

She was born curious and has been learning at least as much outside of school as inside since birth!

DD goes to school, but there hasn’t been a core subject yet where I didn’t have to help her out, explain things to her again or worse , sort out misconceptions.

One particular maths lesson comes to mind, where she thought she did great, when in fact most of the questions were wrong. It was obviously never picked up in that lesson, or at any other point during the year.

I think you are over-estimating how good teacher training is, the pgce was basically a bit of crowd control and some placements. Most of what takes place in a classroom is organising things, lining up, dealing with nonsense after break and lunch. I think parents also over estimate the skills required to teach. The teaching is not the hard bit, it's the paperwork, constant edicts from on high, meetings, disruption. If you take all that away, most teachers who hate their job would actually enjoy it and it would also be much more manageable by more people. So a parent dealing with one or two children has a much easier and more enjoyable job.

Ooh, another example. She randomly saw a short video on YouTube which was a cartoon of the greek myths during Covid. She then went down a rabbit hole and now is like a walking encyclopaedia. As in could take you around the
exhibits at the British Museum without reading any of the descriptions. It’s incredible to watch.

They don’t, but they also don’t care. Given I’ve seen HS families claim that baking takes the place of maths because they measure out ingredients, or walking around random museums takes the place of history, I don’t think they’re that bothered if the kids aren’t receiving an up-to-scratch education.

It’s on your radar, otherwise you’d not have asked the questions or started a thread about it.

My only issue with home education is that you control every aspect of your child's life & learning. You choose what tutors, groups ect your child attends. There is a lot of bias in that choice.

Having an outside influence, away from home, meeting, experiencing and learning to interact with a wide variety of people is essential. Getting different view points and having proper discussions away from the parents is the best way to help children, especially teenagers become independent adults.

Plus, some schools, especially secondary, are an jungle, learning to negotiate that is a brilliant lifeskill for the place of work.

I home educate a 15 year old who is doing his iGCses.

I am a former primary school teacher so I have zero experience in teaching gcse level maths or science.

We look at what we need to know, and we sit down together and learn. I can't remember how to do algebra or physics from 30 years ago (maybe if I had better teachers I would have?). We get books, we look at websites run by teachers, scientists, mathematicians. We use the same websites that schools use when we can. We learn together. I don't teach l. I facilitate.

A friend’s child is 16 and has never been to school. Home Ed groups have wide ranges of children and I’d say she was engaging with a whole host of adults from a very early age as well. She’s a very clever and well rounded child.

Why does everyone assume that no learning - academic or otherwise - happens outside of the home?!

I genuinely don’t know how anyone does it successfully. My daughter (age 7) has unexpectedly not been able to go back to school this week because of issues with the school. Luckily they are moving to a different school next week but we don’t know that until last night so we’ve been trying to do school work at home in case we had to home educate for a bit while finding a new school.

It’s been a nightmare. It’s been such a difficult few days. Maybe it’s just because she’s not used to doing schoolwork at home but she’s been resisting and arguing about it. And when we are managing to do work with her it just feels like we’re playing school rather than actually teaching her anything. I know that with actual home educating there is more to it than sitting down doing schoolwork but still.

It isn’t for me. It isn’t for her. She’s hating it and wants to be at school. We’ll all be glad (us and her) when she’s back in a school next week.

Haven’t read beyond the op but you’re completely missing why most people home educate.

It’s not because they think they can match a school system with its targets and curriculum, it’s because that system very often harms their children, so by default a child not going to school is far better for them and protects their mental health.

Very often these families (including mine) feel forced into deregistering their child, there are no dreamy thoughts of being able to match system that you’ve watched your child go through, that’s taken away their confidence and dismantled their mental health.

Another point is that apart from families with SN children another growing demographic of home edders are teachers who do not want to put their children through the education system. So that’s interesting.

Starting a thread based on this lack of knowledge means that without a doubt YABU

I didn't. Son with ASD, PDA, ADHD, auditory processing issues, anxiety, had stopped eating and sleeping, was crying with anxiety every day until he vomited, and reached the point of suicidal ideation, and was on the point of expulsion from school at age 6. At home he was constantly melting down, and because he wasn't eating, was skeletal and constantly ill.

School decided it was because he was a little shit and I was a bad parent. No other schools would take him because of what the school had written in his national student record. So I had to pull him out.

We do a fairly well known UK-based correspondence school. It's not going to compensate for the social skills that might have been picked up in (a better) school. He does swimming and/or goes running 7 days a week, plays in orchestras, sings in choirs, plays chamber music, plays in competitions, attends music camps, has very high aspirations academically and musically. I have enough background in science and maths (former academic) to be able to teach him those to A-level. Music is already being taught by his music teachers. English, history, geography, geography, languages will be being outsourced once that becomes necessary.

I'd prefer he was school, but that's not currently an option. At least he's alive, eating and sleeping, and functioning well academically and reasonably well socially.

An old friend has done it from the start and her DD just did her GCSE exams at a local college. She has paid tutors and lots of extra curricular stuff, none of it was cheap. She basically hated the school run and felt depressed when her life revolved around it so decided she wanted the freedom of setting her own schedule and such.

Bloody hell, I don’t know that hating the school run is a justifiable reason to home ed 🥴

I have a teaching background and so do many other home educating parents.

I don't think that I could teach beyond key stage 2 outside of my subject areas.

At key stage one and two, it's a bit different because children vary so widely in their ability levels that it's a luxury to go at the child's pace. I realise I have an edge in terms of my background but I also make use of the resources available to schools, the resources specifically made for the home ed community and tutors. My children did return to school with advanced study skills, a real love for learning because it had all been tailored to their interests and they have been in the top sets ever since.

One of my children was in the bottom set for everything when we removed her from school and was very unhappy. She had additional needs that were not acknowledged. We were later told that this was due to a lack of funding, not, as we'd been told at the time, a belief that there was no need for special provision.

I worked my ass off to make it fun, effective and cover all the bases. Their formal learning time was relatively brief because one can get so much more done in a one to one setting. They still spend most of their lives doing fuck knows what building dams and dens and sea glass fortresses with other feral children. There was at least one birthday every week in our community so there was always cake. They played with everyone regardless of age or gender. They also did all the usual things like swimming and surf school but more cheaply because it was during school hours. A lot of places like zoos, museums and theme parks will open during school hours to home ed groups and many educational resources are available at a vastly reduced price to home ed families subscribing or attending as a group. When my son entered school he became instantly popular with everyone because he was willing to play with little girls from other classes and give his time to everyone in a way that other little boys didn't. He also didn't see the point of wasting time in lessons because why would you, this is your learning so you can grow up and do stuff.

I did sometimes think what the hell was I doing but my daughter went back to school after four years at home and said, "Everything is so easy. When will I learn something new?" She continued to say this until the spring term of big school. Not bad for a kid who couldn't read in the school system at age 8.