Be honest, I want everyone's views......what do you think of home ed???

[3Ddonut]

I suspect this may get nasty, but please try to keep it nice ladies (and gents) I really like the idea of home ed, I would dearly love to home ed my dc but there are some problems, firstly I work 3 nights a week and my dh works 2 full days,my eldest dd is 5 and she really loves school, but some of things that she says about school unsettle me, I always said that it is their choice if they want to go to school or not, which is why she is there and my ds is in nursery but I wish she'd want to stay home and the longer that she's there, the more I feel that we're wasting time...

I've read a lot of the other threads and see that you can do some home-ed stuff alongside school but I don't think that it's enough for me, I want them to remain interested and not be moved on from one thing too quickly or forced to spend time on things they dislike.

We're already a close family because of mine and dh's shifts there is nearly always someone in the house and we get to spend a lot of time with the kids. I suppose I'd just like it to be more of the same.

My main concerns are that the dc would resent us for it in the future (although I would not take a happy child out of school) I also worry about the effect of home ed-ing the children would have on future employers and university places, I do worry about the socialisation aspect although the kids are in a few groups and are very social, they interact well with adults as well as other children, I'm concerned about how much time I'd have to work with them with working full time myself (no opportunity to cut hours)

I'm going round in circles at the min, I think my ds would be more open to the idea and I'm considering not sending dd2 to nursery at all.

The other biggie is that the school they attend is out of area and it's a really good one, they wouldn't get back in there if we deregistered, I've considered flexi-schooling but I feel that would bring more problems than solutions....

OK, Open fire!!!

...& it appears I can't type either...

Terramum "That's the difference between schools & HEing. Schools have to be "broad & balanced" to cater as best they can for a group of people with a wide variety of interests & abilities. HE can be truly personalised to the child's abilities and interests. "

see this is definitely the really yummy bit about HE...and makes me think ooh how fantastic really.

BUT...I see my 6 year old and all she wants to do is cut out fairies all day long, and all my son wants to do is build lego...and I think...how the hell is listening to their interests going to lead to an all rounded education????They have to be made to learn th times table and spell or else it just aint gonna happen!

From Wed 14:50ish

By Seeker (sorry just using you because you were home edded so have seen the advantages and disadvantages):

"And another think I never learnt til I was an adult - (and it was a hard lesson when I started work, let me tell you!) -was that sometimes - quite often actually - you just have to do stuff even if it's boring. You just have to get on and get it done."

I think that's a lesson that's worth learning personally. It makes life a lot easier....

Ah got it ta yurt!

I agree actually - life is full of stuff you have to do for one reason or another. I personally feel you would have to have led a very privileged life not to have done anything you didn't want to do. DS does stuff every day he hates & doesn't want to...atm they involve getting dressed or picking up his toys! Ironically the stuff I really hate doing like the washing up & the laundry he really likes .

MO I obviously can't speak for your children, but my Dd (5.10) only wanted to dress up for the first 6-7 months of HE and it took nerves of bloody steel to rein in my natural tendencies to sit her down and make her learn the times tables I'll be honest.
I kept looking at the levels she should be up to and worrying that she was behind in comparison to other KS1 kids. However, leaving her to discover things for herself with help from me if she asked has been the best thing for her. In 2 months she has skipped right through the ORT books from Level 3 last Summer to level 8. I haven't sat down and taught her, she knew letters and some phonic sounds from asking what words were when we were reading together, but then she just started reading everything around her, "taxi, asda, post office etc" We've dispensed with the ORT now and she reads whatever she fancies.
My Ds is completely different, he thrives on a subject star chart on the fridge and diligently completes his work everyday, he loves the structure we provide for him atm (he's 4 btw).
I mentioned in an earlier post that it's about trusting children, which is a rather hard thing to do.
I'm sure people who watch us would think she does nothing in the way of eduction with those kids, but spy a little more closely and you'd discover that yes we are playing with a bouncy ball, laughing and chasing it around the house, but we've also discovered gravity and kinetic & potential energy :D

yeah my kids do boring stuff they don't want to do all the time. They have to help clear up their room because if I do it alone, we won't have time to go to the park. They have to take their plates through and rinse them, else the plates won't be reading for the next meal (these are special moomin plates, btw-they would be given food even if they didn't scape their plates)

a lot of heing (and other) families do use this natural consequence approach, meaning that the kids grow up knowing that they have to do things they don't like to get stuff that they do.

But even if they don't-its hardly a difficult-to-learn thing, is it? At some point, every kid will be faced with a choice between doing something not-fun to get a fun thing, and not having the fun thing. so then they will usually learn.

I went to secondary school and I know we did trigonometry because I remember the word.

Couldn't tell you what is tho and certainly couldn't use it.

Just went through the motions like I did with everything else at school.

So what was the point ?

"DS has absorbed a a lot so far just my watching us do things..."

Trouble is that very few children can do this at the higher levels of study.

I'm taching a very able group of kids in the upper sixth, all As and B grades predicted, all off to good universities.

And I have to unravel,unpick and explain things to them.

and then I have to set the appropriate tasks to consolidate their understanding. All teachers do this.

I took my kids to robin hoods' bay and we had lots of fun looking for fossils and talking about them. As a teacher I know that their understanding of these concepts is scanty because we haven't worked through them enough. We had a nice time. But ai Haven't really taught them the rock cycle, I facilitated a trip to the beach.

Well sometimes to do what you want with life you have to jump through hoops.

I spent a number of years teaching students who were doing retakes because they wanted to get into medical school. Taught quite a few bright students, often with lots of excellent people skills (ie students who would have made good doctors) who had no ability to learn for exams. They wanted to be doctors, but they didn't have the study skills to pass the exams to get there.

Recently I decided I wanted to move into research into autism. To do so I needed to take a 2 year course - which in itself was fairly pointless but necessary to have any chance of getting fuding for the research I wanted to do. 2 and a half years later here I am doing what I've wanted to do for many years an being paid for it.

It needed a bit more 'working at something I didn't like' that clearing away a few plates though.

I worry that children who are educated autonomously are less likely to develop the abilities to stick at something boring for a couple of years - that might be necessary for them to do something really exciting eventually. I've taught enough bright students to know that it's not something that's picked up that easily. Some of the young people I taught never got it- despite really wanting the 'reward' of medical school at the end.

I have a similar experience.

I 'had' to take physics at A level to get to read Biochemistry at university (the other option was maths and I would have likeld that even less)

I loathed it. hated every minute but I needed a good gread, worked hard and got it.

I found parts of he couse I studied, easier because I had some basic grasp of physics.

Now, 25 year doen the line I'm using my understanding of phsics when I teach lower down the school and I'm loving it.

Yes, I could have gone back to school and got my physics qualifications as an adult (buggering hard to do that though, because no many night schools do physics) I could do some work with the OU, but my time is limited.

How fortunate I was that my school provided me with a range of subjects.

My ability to bellow the right notes to my dd while she practices her music has also been helpful of late, andother benefit of a ballenced education I never thought about at age 16 9 smile0

I know it's not always a good idea to argue from the particular to the general - but I would like to talk about my neice. Her parents were great advocates of autonomous learning. When she was 27 she decided that she wanted to be a barrister. She had no qualifications, so she had to start from scratch. She is now 35 and she's getting there but my God it's been a struggle. She has had to compete against a whole aremy of younger applicants for every course, every pupillage - everything. She sees people her own age settled into careers. And she said to me at the weekend thst she has realized that she will probably never be in a position to have children.

If she had jumped through the necessary hoops at the "right" time instead of making decisions for herself based on how she felt when she was 15 and thought she was going to be a world class fashion designer she would be a much happier woman now.

like I say, autonomously educated kids have jumped through the hoops necessary to go to harvard to do law and medicine and loads of other stuff

I mean, this isn't an especially new thing. Kids have grown up being autonomously educated and done plenty of stuff that requires them to knuckle down and get on with stuff. Happens all the time.

I'm a bit mystified by this objection, tbh.

But anyway, it IS getting like groundhog day

'I'm a bit mystified by this objection, tbh.'

Beacuse it take a shed load more effeort to do this later in life when you have other oblications and calls on your time.

I used to teach in Might school. It was full of lovely , but knackered, people who, having autonimously decided to mess about in school and failed their GCSE science then had to do it later in life.

When they usually had a full time job and a family as well as doing GCSE Human Biology with me. To a student, they all said they wished that had done it at 16 when it was easier to organise.

terramum...Summerhill in the UK lets a pupil choose if hey want to go to lessons or not
There is so much I would like to say on this thread,but it would take too long and I haven't the time.
Hope you ok 3D AND enjoying the commentsand finding them useful

I did GCSE biology at 37 with a home and 6 children to look after, also pregnant with no7. Not that difficult. In fact, I enjoyed it. So I don't think that the odd GCSE here and there is too difficult to achieve if you want to do it.

My sister studied and took the exams to become a Fellow of the Chartered Insurers Institute. It was what she wanted and she put a lot of hard work into it while running a home, looking after her child, being pregnant and doing a full time responsible woh job that had a difficult commute. She had left school at 16 with no qualifications at all and didn't really know what she wanted to do apart from be independant and have her own money. Now she has a string of qualifications.

yeah I'm halfway through an OU chemistry degree, I have 3 kids under 4.5 and am thus far averaging a Distinction

I guess different people just have different experiences really

Autonomous education is a world away from messing about in school though.

Did I misread the original post? Did you say that your children want to go to school?

I think you've missed my point which was that I have taught 19 year olds who wanted to go to medical school but couldn't because they didn't have the necessary study skills. All I am saying is that some forms of HE might increase the risk of that situation.

The thing is though you can jump through all the 'normal' hoops by taking your GCSEs, A levels, at the 'usual' time & then go on to uni etc...but still find you aren't doing well in your employment. My DH has had a good school education right up to degree level, yet through circumstances beyond his control ended up being unemployed for nearly 2 years.

There's no guarantees in life about any type of schooling. After a while how you were schooled and what kind of school qualifications you have start to become more irrelevant, and job success becomes more about experience and work-based training...

But the OPs children want to be at school. Or at least one child does. Isn't that right? it sounds as if the OP wants her children to want tto be home educated. And they don't. That's surely a separate issue and a slightly different one to home ed versus schools.

I did my PGCE as an adult with two children, and a husband away for large periods of time.
I did my first degree as an 18 year old.

I know which I had more fun doing!

My brother did his first degree with the OU, as an adult. I know that it sa far harder for him to do that than it was for me.

I also had the added benefit of mixing with large numbers of people from different backgrounds, learning about different world views, and also their subjects. I know more about Julian the Apostate than just about any other biology teacher in the UK I think!

My brother missed out on this.

He has a fine degree from the OU, but missed all the added extras. And yes, I do know about summer school, but the two just don't match up

Can you home educate AND have a career or at the very least an interesting job?

What would you say to someone whose child really, really hates school with every fibre in his little body and has done since nursery school. A bright child with an incredibly IQ but with learning difficulties who comes home every day asking how many more years before he can leave school? Who is a square peg refusing to be battered into a school-suitable round hole. Who knows an incredible amount of 'stuff' about all sorts of things he has read and researched himself but is bored and feels patronised at school. Who hates organised group activities.

Now I would give anything for him to be happy at school - I loved school, his brother loves school but...

Would you all have the same objections to HE?

(I can't do it incidentally, I have to work but, theoretically I would withdraw him tomorrow.)

Plenty of HEers do go to uni though - not all of them just use OU...and many get in with a portfolio of work & interviews - not an A level or GCSE in sight.

That's one of the benefits of HE imo - it allows you the choice to do things in a way that suits your & your skills...not just because that's how everyone else does it iyswim.