Hi my name is Miss Deborah Robins
My daughter is 15 years old she will be 16 years old in July.
She has been bullied from P5 in primary school she is now year 11 in high school and the bullying has continued, my daughter has really bad anxiety and she’s afraid to go into school.
she has told me that she wants to be home school and now I’m agreeing with her.
can anyone help and give me advice please!!
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Home ed
Homeschooling
Debz89 · 08/04/2024 16:15
Leonab · 10/04/2024 13:22
If homeschooling, it's important that your daughter has the discipline to do the required studying and also an understanding of effective learning methods. What's your opinion of the situation of this?
You should also consider any ways that her progress can be measured on a regular basis. A good way to do this could be through online apps.
Saracen · 11/04/2024 23:42
@Leonab I can certainly see that it won't go well if someone is using a tutor and essentially expecting the tutor to do all the work for them, not taking the tutor's advice on what to do between lessons, and imagining they will emerge with a nice set of GCSE results.
However, not everyone learns that way. Some don't choose to do GCSEs at all, or not when they are young, instead going straight into work. Others approach exam preparation in a manner which I'm sure you would consider slapdash, but which is effective for them. For example, here's how my eldest child tackled maths.
They did no formal maths as a child, instead learning through whatever interested them. Money is an introduction to decimals. If you like science or wonder about converting fractions to decimals, you'll encounter more. Probability is important to kids who like to play D&D or poker. Converting American recipes gives experience of different units of measurement. We never have the right size and shape baking tins, so you need to know how to calculate the area of a round tin and see whether it's close enough to the area of the rectangular tin specified in the recipe. And so on. They had achieved basic numeracy by their mid-teens, though their knowledge didn't map perfectly onto the school maths curriculum.
My child wasn't originally planning to do maths GCSE. When they decided to sit the exam after all, they downloaded the syllabus, identified the topics which were new to them, and figured out which of those they actually wanted to learn which would bring in enough marks to get the result they wanted. They didn't bother to learn topics which scored minimal points and which didn't seem relevant to their life, reasoning they could learn that material in later years if needed. They obtained a textbook, learned the target topics, and sat some mock exams. Once they were comfortably on track for the result they wanted, they stopped working.
The overall picture here is not of a disciplined, hardworking student who would have pleased schoolteachers. That wasn't what my teen aspired to be. They wanted to know only the maths which was fun and interesting, plus the maths they perceived to be immediately useful to them. Having decided to sit the GCSE, they sought to do the bare minimum for the result they reckoned they would need in life. I didn't notice them experiencing any particular difficulty from the "knowledge gaps" in maths which you mentioned. They saw them; they fixed them, starting with 7x8 which had somehow never sunk in previously. It wasn't a big deal.
You don't have to be a model student if you aren't spending most of your time in a school-type environment. It's possible for learning to be fun and playful most of the time. In the home ed community, GCSEs are seen as a (usually) necessary evil, and some kids adopt an expedient approach to getting through them. Even for an arts-focused child like mine, there are plenty of opportunities to learn more maths throughout their life, provided you haven't absorbed the idea that maths is so unpleasant that people would only do it if forced, which is the message instilled by school.
A kid who isn't motivated by a school-type approach is, I think, a particularly good candidate for home education, which can give them the scope to engage with their learning on their own terms.
If you haven't read Lockhart's Lament, I recommend it to you: https://maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
Saracen · 12/04/2024 22:13
@Leonab, the thing is, in a home ed environment children are usually given far more autonomy over their learning than they would have at school. The result is that they have the opportunity to develop self-discipline. They make mistakes learn from their mistakes, and fix their mistakes.
In the example I gave, my child was not forced to learn 7x8 at the age of nine, and chose not to. Was that a mistake which they later regretted? Maybe. Did it destroy their life and leave them unable to cope? Clearly not. My DC is now competent at maths, has a good GCSE to show for it, and is at the top of their class at university.
Being made to learn specific things in a particular way at a certain age does not develop self-discipline. If anything, it impedes it. What happens when they are no longer being told what to do every day? Ask anyone who teaches first-year university students. It's a steep learning curve.
Long ago, I worked in a university admissions office in the US. We were extremely keen to recruit home educated applicants, because they were known to hit the ground running. This was in contrast to most of the school-educated students, who required about a year at uni to learn how to organise their own learning and take the initiative. At the time I knew nothing about home education and didn't really understand why this might be. Now I have seen it for myself, I can see how their early experiences of decision-making had given the HE kids a head start.
evertheblue · 14/04/2024 00:28
what grade did they get? Your description looks more like they just did some basic arithmetic, rather than actual maths
Saracen · 11/04/2024 23:42
@Leonab I can certainly see that it won't go well if someone is using a tutor and essentially expecting the tutor to do all the work for them, not taking the tutor's advice on what to do between lessons, and imagining they will emerge with a nice set of GCSE results.
However, not everyone learns that way. Some don't choose to do GCSEs at all, or not when they are young, instead going straight into work. Others approach exam preparation in a manner which I'm sure you would consider slapdash, but which is effective for them. For example, here's how my eldest child tackled maths.
They did no formal maths as a child, instead learning through whatever interested them. Money is an introduction to decimals. If you like science or wonder about converting fractions to decimals, you'll encounter more. Probability is important to kids who like to play D&D or poker. Converting American recipes gives experience of different units of measurement. We never have the right size and shape baking tins, so you need to know how to calculate the area of a round tin and see whether it's close enough to the area of the rectangular tin specified in the recipe. And so on. They had achieved basic numeracy by their mid-teens, though their knowledge didn't map perfectly onto the school maths curriculum.
My child wasn't originally planning to do maths GCSE. When they decided to sit the exam after all, they downloaded the syllabus, identified the topics which were new to them, and figured out which of those they actually wanted to learn which would bring in enough marks to get the result they wanted. They didn't bother to learn topics which scored minimal points and which didn't seem relevant to their life, reasoning they could learn that material in later years if needed. They obtained a textbook, learned the target topics, and sat some mock exams. Once they were comfortably on track for the result they wanted, they stopped working.
The overall picture here is not of a disciplined, hardworking student who would have pleased schoolteachers. That wasn't what my teen aspired to be. They wanted to know only the maths which was fun and interesting, plus the maths they perceived to be immediately useful to them. Having decided to sit the GCSE, they sought to do the bare minimum for the result they reckoned they would need in life. I didn't notice them experiencing any particular difficulty from the "knowledge gaps" in maths which you mentioned. They saw them; they fixed them, starting with 7x8 which had somehow never sunk in previously. It wasn't a big deal.
You don't have to be a model student if you aren't spending most of your time in a school-type environment. It's possible for learning to be fun and playful most of the time. In the home ed community, GCSEs are seen as a (usually) necessary evil, and some kids adopt an expedient approach to getting through them. Even for an arts-focused child like mine, there are plenty of opportunities to learn more maths throughout their life, provided you haven't absorbed the idea that maths is so unpleasant that people would only do it if forced, which is the message instilled by school.
A kid who isn't motivated by a school-type approach is, I think, a particularly good candidate for home education, which can give them the scope to engage with their learning on their own terms.
If you haven't read Lockhart's Lament, I recommend it to you: https://maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
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