What Is Homeschooling?
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published April 29, 2009 |
Articles |
printer friendly version
Find out what homeschooling is all about. A MUST READ for anyone considering homeschooling!
The Blessings
Schedule
Let’s face it; the only reason why a child needs to wake up at 7AM (or earlier) is to make it to her classroom by 8:15AM so she won’t be tardy - tardy for lessons which will end up dinging the school’s statistics which may put the school district budget at risk next fiscal year.
No such concerns for homeschooling! The child can get up at a reasonable hour and lessons will begin when the child is ready (not when the school is ready as is the case of the public school).
Also, every once in a while, do you ever wonder why you hear about some super-achieving home school kid that is 3-4 years beyond their grade level and plans to graduate with multiple majors, all the while spending much less time homeschooling compared to that of the public schools? At first this may seem like the parents are super-pushy and driving the kid to nothing more than absolute academic domination – but there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this and a lot has to do with the schedule.
In a typical public school, there are about 20 kids in a classroom for 6 hours of instruction (it’s actually less than 6 hours due to lunch, recess, etc., but let’s give the public school some leeway here because the results of my analysis are still the same). This averages out to the teacher giving about 18 minutes of individualized attention to each kid. In private school, where the classroom size is usually half of that of the public school, this equates to 36 minutes of individualized attention for each kid. In home schooling, spending just one hour with your child is almost double the individualized time spent compared to private school and more than 3 times the amount compared to public school – and remember, that’s assuming that you spend only 1 hour of one-on-one time with your child.
For Kindergarten, we spend about 2 hours each day with Ryan – which equates to 6 times the amount of individualized attention that he would receive compared to a public school. More attention usually results in more courses covered, and therefore, it’s perfectly natural to assume then, that homeschool kids should out-achieve their public and private school peers. The frosting on the cake is that you can achieve these results in significantly less time than the 6 hours of classroom time required in public schools. Bottom line: you can cover so much more topics in significantly less time with your home schooled child compared to typical public and private schools, resulting in “overachievement”.
Finally, what if your child is not feeling well that day? Recommended more as an exception than the rule, just move her lesson to the evening. Or arrange for this missed lesson on the weekend. No way can public schools compete with that type of flexibility.
view as single page
Not What You're Looking For?
Use our Search Engine!
For best results, enter a 3-4 word search term. Then, if you get too many results, try adding another word to narrow down your results. If you get too few results, try removing a word from your search term to increase your search results.
Try it now!