Madhu asks: > Charles, what exactly did "homeschooling" involve? Did you personally teach > them everything? Hired private tutors? I'm curious.
My wife taught them most subjects, but we also had access to classes taught at the local charter school and they took some of those classes. Deepa adds: > I would not choose it, because I > would want my child to have all the interaction with peers (including > pressure) and the formation of life-long friendships that usually > happen. Neither my experience, nor my wife's experience in US public schools was particularly positive. Being bright, interested, inquisitive, and energetic is often discouraged, sometimes forcefully, by your "peers." If there isn't a large enough group of academically oriented kids in the school it can be very hard. Further, the school I went to did not offer sufficient curriculum in some of the subjects I was interested in. I had exhausted their Math curriculum by my first year, and was left to "independent study" in Math for two years. I did make two or three friends that I am still occasionally in contact with (one was the best man at my wedding) but mostly I have no contact nor interest in the people I went to school with. It was a thoroughly unpleasant and nearly useless experience that I wanted to spare my children from. Danese says: > Its a pretty well-established > movement, though and I'd expect a long legal battle since most of the > homeschoolers I know are not the kind of people who desire to have their > children trained to be "loyal to the state". Yeah. My son, in his few interactions with local kids in the classroom, was surprised to discover just how little they were aware of world events and politics and how conservative they were. My wife and kids live in a relatively rural area of California that is very conservative politically, and my son didn't make himself popular when he would argue that the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake and that George Bush was an idiot. That's my boy! -- Charles
