fett on 22/4/2009 at 14:06
Quote Posted by ilweran
I have never in the workplace - or anywhere else, but I tend not to go out on a Friday or Saturday night - had to dodge chairs being thrown at me, had food rubbed in my hair, been punched, kicked, tripped up, had knives thrown at me or been pushed out into the road in front of a car.
This. In a work situation, you may be "cooped up with assholes till 2:15" everyday, but there are limits. You don't get beat up in the bathroom, have your lunch tray dumped in your lap, or get ridiculed because you don't party.
But the assumption that people homeschool to save their kids from this is still a stereotype. Knowing my 7 year old, he's more likely the kid who would be stuck in the middle because he often stands up to bullies on behalf of other kids, but neither is he ever the target of their venom because he can take care of himself, despite wearing glasses and being the shortest one in his classroom. They've already learned that if they push him around, he will fix their shit and fast. He gets that from my wife - don't fuck with her.
For some reason it seems that the majority are willing to sacrifice a better education on the altar or socialization. If socialization is the primary advantage of public school, the cart is before the horse. I'd rather my kid grow up to employ the assholes because he's smarter than them, than know how to cope with the lackey asshole sitting in the next cubicle (if those are my choices). Wouldn't you?
Turtle on 22/4/2009 at 16:57
That's why we send our daughter to public school and home school her part time.
june gloom on 22/4/2009 at 17:34
Unfortunately climbing the corporate ladder is less reliant on education and more reliant on figurative (and sometimes literal!) dicksucking.
Anyway, it seems like you're doing your damnedest to actually provide worthwhile homeschooling, and kudos to you for that. I still think they need at least some experience in a school society. As has been pointed out before, a lot of it's dependant on the kind of school they get sent to. The vocational school I went to was a controlled madhouse- everyone in the school was a total misfit and on one occasion we all got relocated to another building for the entire day (sitting in the hallway listening to Zombie Sneak Attack and reading Stephen King all day ftw) because of a bomb threat, but by and large the place was kept under very strict control by the staff. The school cop was a nice guy, too, so people respected his authority. Though every once in a while you'd get some hilarious story of shenanigans, like the time the school cop came in looking for a student, and explained that someone was smoking weed in the crawlspaces above some of the admin offices again. (Keyword again.) Or the time some students got up to the roof, and one of them had to take a dump, and rather than go back downstairs and risk getting caught, decided to just go over the side of the building. Teacher comes out a nearby door and sees this big bare ass across the way taking a shit. You can imagine there was a shitstorm after that, pun not intended.
Man vocational school rocked.
demagogue on 22/4/2009 at 18:17
Quote Posted by ilweran
How often does that actually happen though? What I learnt from school is that if you stand out in any way - listen to different music, dress differently, have an actual interest in learning, want to have an intelligent conversation - your peers will hate you and make your life hell.
In case it wasn't so clear, that's exactly the point... It is a struggle to find anything in common or talk with a lot of people (assholes), and they make it hell for you to be yourself. That's exactly the struggle I meant that's important for learning to deal with people and realize when you turn around they don't just disappear. If you just throw your hands up and say, "to hell with it; goodbye people that aren't like me", then you miss out on that.
Koki said it better...
Quote:
Alternatively you may end up mentally crippled, unable to trust anyone completely, even friends, analyzing everyone's words as somehow implying something against you, generally having your self-esteem shot to hell, and other nasties.
If somebody gets that paranoid, not sure it's just the school's fault, or they would have been better off somewhere else. Or the school may just be disfunctionally fucked up, which would be awful. There are limits to anything.
Quote:
If socialization is the primary advantage of public school, the cart is before the horse.
I didn't mention it, but a major thing I loved about public school was I thought the education was better than what peers at private schools got (my impression anyway), and not even just the religious ones. I may have been very lucky, but my class had really brilliant and eclectic people and we'd push each other in class (a lot of whom were from poorer families you wouldn't expect to go to a private school), and really great teachers. When I visited a few private schools, I got the impression (maybe prejudiced) that kids just expected learning to be handed to them like an entitlement and wouldn't go to classes feeling lucky to be learning whatever it was. That isn't a very scientific observation, I know... I just always took a certain pride in the education I got.
june gloom on 22/4/2009 at 18:23
My education at the deaf school would confirm your assessment. Some of our teachers were excellent, to be sure, but I don't feel like the school really gave us enough education. This plus interference from the archdioscese, AND the added layer of deaf politics and you get subpar education hampered by bullshit. I had to completely re-learn algebra in my first year of college. That said, I doubt I'd be able to do anything past the first 20-30 pages of a textbook because algebra is so utterly irrelevant to my interests that I've probably forgotten it all.
rachel on 22/4/2009 at 20:33
Quote Posted by demagogue
If somebody gets that paranoid, not sure it's just the school's fault, or they would have been better off somewhere else. Or the school may just be disfunctionally fucked up, which would be awful. There are limits to anything.
Not so much paranoia (at least not as I understand the word), rather a combination of learned helplessness, extreme shyness and low self-esteem. It's a very vicious circle.
Personnally it took me years to even start to get out of it, and I'm not quite "there" yet. It's still very hard for me to socialize, I'm pretty much always cautious and it takes a very, very long time for me to decide to trust someone.
Because somewhere there's still that little voice that tells me there's no reason why anyone should bother with me anyway, so why even try, right?
I was just fine til high school, had lots of friends and stuff. Then some dumb fuck decided I was his personal punching-ball fifteen years ago. :erg:
Since then I've been climbing that moutain, one step at a time, all by myself. And for a few month now, I've had the summit in sight. Yay for armchair positive psychology.
ilweran on 23/4/2009 at 09:45
Quote Posted by demagogue
In case it wasn't so clear, that's exactly the point... It is a struggle to find anything in common or talk with a lot of people (assholes), and they make it hell for you to be yourself. That's exactly the struggle I meant that's important for learning to deal with people and realize when you turn around they don't just disappear. If you just throw your hands up and say, "to hell with it; goodbye people that aren't like me", then you miss out on that.
hmm, I spent most of secondary school not talking to anyone and avoiding as many people as possible because I wanted to stay in one piece.
I really don't have a problem with people who aren't like me, 99.9% of the time in work I can be nice to people I despise/who really freak me out/who are just annoying or trouble makers and I learnt how to do that through being in the workplace and using a bit of patience and common sense. Not from school.
catbarf on 23/4/2009 at 10:23
Quote Posted by fett
This. In a work situation, you may be "cooped up with assholes till 2:15" everyday, but there are limits. You don't get beat up in the bathroom, have your lunch tray dumped in your lap, or get ridiculed because you don't party.
Personally, I've never experienced any of the above, despite being one of the nerds. Maybe my school's just different, but the crime rate is significant (mostly drug-related) so it seems a little odd that my experience and those of my friends are at odds with the depiction in this thread.
I think that public school is likely to result in a better education. The teachers are state-funded and have degrees in relevant information. Unless you hire several private tutors (which becomes very expensive, very quickly), you're not going to offer the same level of expertise. Reading a book and learning from a teacher are two entirely different things. Furthermore, from what I've seen it's more difficult to get into college without having attended a public or private school, so it may just be worse in the long run.
fett on 23/4/2009 at 13:24
I'll make you a deal:
Tell me one thing you use on a daily basis from Physics, Biology, Chemistry, or Geometry class that you learned in high school, and I'll hire private tutors. Most people can't. Even if I do as well as most high school teachers (and I can), my kids lose nothing academically. If my kids show an aptitude for subjects that I can't teach (as well as a high school student), then obviously I'll took to other sources for help. It's a misnomer that we can only learn from qualified teachers who have degrees. I'll finish my education degree next year (pleasegodi'mbeggingyou) and I've got to say, I'm far from convinced that there's anything an uneducated person can't learn from books and self-experimentation. Teaching programs teach you how to teach, not what to teach. What they teach is curriculum purchased by the school district that is unable to address individual interests and is inflexible for a child that either zooms ahead or falls back in a particular subject.
Your conjecture about public schools resulting in better education is statistically wrong - look at these study results from the Home School Legal Defense Association: (
http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000000/00000017.asp) http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000000/00000017.asp. Homeschooled children are consistently scoring better on the ACT, SAT, college entrance exams and starting jobs at higher rates of pay.
ilweran on 23/4/2009 at 13:44
Quote Posted by catbarf
Maybe my school's just different, but the crime rate is significant (mostly drug-related) so it seems a little odd that my experience and those of my friends are at odds with the depiction in this thread.
My school was quite clever in that it promoted itself as being a really good school and it did have an excellent reputation, but it did this by covering up the things that other schools nearby were a bit more honest about. The primary concern of the headteacher seemed to be maintaining that reputation rather than the wellbeing of the students. Maybe your school sees things the other way round?
I should point out that I left school about 15yrs ago, before the current hysteria in the UK about knife crime and feral youths, and it wasn't in a poor inner-city area. It was in a fairly middle-class bit of a poor area in South Wales, with students from poorer working class upto middle class backgrounds.
