Marriage and the Power of Divorce

Khane_sl said:

Again, you think very highly of yourself. You're forgetting there are 6-8 subjects every semester you'd have to teach the kid. Some would be easy because you would understand it more readily, some would be more difficult. The teachers in high school only have to concentrate on one subject for one grade, year round, year after year. And if you're intelligent and savvy enough to be able to actually teach your kids effectively you're wasting your own talents and potential by staying at home and foregoing your promising career.

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In my hypothetical situation, I'm a stay-at-home dad. No subject in highschool is "difficult". We're not imparting some deep wisdom on kids in public education; we're setting up foundations so they can go out and do it themselves without being crippled. Multiplication tables (math), ATP/mitochondria (bio), leg/ele/jud (gov)... This isn't difficult theoretical work -- it's the bare fucking minimum. Any difficulties I run into due to my own unfamiliarity will beeasilymade up for by the boon of being able to accelerate my kid as needed through easy portions of the curriculum.

Seriously, do you know how much of a joke HS is these days? Or even college general ed! My algebra teacher doesn't even teach us; at the start of class we were told to go buy a $150 cd key for mathlab and mathlab teaches us. Our teacher just fields questions from confused retards and ends up confusing them even more. Mathlab literally teaches the entire curriculum, and I have an A. I know FOR SURE I could teach a student a week behind me 1 on 1 better than the education they get from being in a classroom of 20+ being held to the LCD.

BrutulTM_sl said:

At the high school level? Hell no they aren't difficult.

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Agree.

Khane_sl said:

Well I think I just had a vastly different experience in HS than most of you. My parents never could have taught me what I learned there. And my Chemistry classes were far more involved than memorizing the periodic table and "blowing shit up". I guess it mostly depends on your kid. If you have an advanced child who is ahead of the curve it's going to be more difficult for you to be their sole tutor as they get into 10th, 11th and especially 12th grade.

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Maybe it mostly depends on the parent. There is nothing terrifically difficult about teach AP Physics, or Calculus or History out of a course curriculum if you have a reasonable knowledge of the subject and the ability to learn along with the child. I can see where teaching a language would be more difficult because there less objectivity in AP English and naturally teaching a foreign language you don't speak natively is pretty futile.

Maybe your experience was really different than mine, but all my AP Math/Sciences were more or less a lecture instructing on the subject and students doing work to reinforce the skills. You don't need an advanced degree in physics in order to follow along an AP Physics curriculum. High School coursework that you successfully understood is more than enough.

Back on the topic of marriage, yesterday we were chilling at home in the living room and the wife started closing all the blinds. Not abnormal since she hates people seeing into the house. Then she put the dog out and got naked. Bent over the couch and let me have at it. I don't know where it came from, but it was awesome. Then she let me play video games.

I think homeschooling very much depends on the kid too. My husband for example would have excelled with a very self directed curriculum. He was extremely gifted and hated school. He never did homework, his teachers hated him, but he tested very very well. He tried UCLA for a year or so, hated the American system of lecture halls and shit and moved over to Oxford. They have a far more self directed approach to teached. In the three years he went there, he never attended one of the optional lectures but through the one on one tutorials (up to four on one) and self teaching, he did awesome.

Some kids just don't work with the traditional school system and schools are not equipped to handle them.

Noodleface_sl said:

Back on the topic of marriage, yesterday we were chilling at home in the living room and the wife started closing all the blinds. Not abnormal since she hates people seeing into the house. Then she put the dog out and got naked. Bent over the couch and let me have at it. I don't know where it came from, but it was awesome. Then she let me play video games.

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She's preggers. Things like this will happen.

So about the whole lawn mowing thing. I have a lawn tractor and my girlfriend wanted to try it out. Her being a "city girl" she was ridiculously excited by the prospect of a riding mower. So I told her to just follow the perimeter of the lawn and mow that way.

I thought that would be impossible to fuck up. Jesus christ the route she picked was absolutely pants on head retarded. I've never seen such a disgraceful lawn mowing technique. There are a ton of leaves on the ground making it literally impossible to not be able to follow the lines either. Yet she managed to fuck that up too. I let her take two laps then I fired her and did it myself.

To be fair when I was a kid and inherited mowing the lawn as a chore it took me a few rounds to figure out how to make it all work out. Granted I was like 12.

Maybe she was doing hipster lawn mowing and not conforming to your straight-line standards. Was she wearing her giant ear gauges and her 1950's hairdo?

My cousin has her kids do homeschooling 3 days a week and has classes with other kids 2 days a week. Not sure how she set that up, but it seems to be working well. She never went to college, wishes her vagina was a clown car, doesn't believe in pollution and hates the shit out of Obama, but her kids are turning out to be pretty smart so far. I'm hoping it continues and that they end up nothing like her.

What do you mean she doesn't believe in pollution?

If you have a square yard I don't for the life of me understand how you could fuck it up.

Maybe you have to do it once to realize that you need to box it out, and maybe you have to do it once to get comfortable with the turning radius of your lawn-tank. And maybe sometimes you make patterns in the mow lines just to amuse yourself.

But how do you fuck it up!

Assuming you home schooled your kids from the start Khane, do you really think you you wouldn't be ready by the time they hit high school? You'd have eight years of data on how well you were doing. I mean you'd either know you were ready to teach them that material, or you'd hire tutors. Or you'd do what ends up happening to a lot of home schooled kids: community colleges is a pretty close to mirror to advanced high school classes (depending on the CC). You can start your kids in CC at 16, they can transfer to a four year school at 18 with a huge head start and either graduate by 20 or study abroad, enjoy college life, etc., with much less stress. This is ignoring the enormous, and growing, number of resources out there for home schooling. The number of students being home schooled doubled since 2007. And yes, I have absolute confidence I could teach my kids any HS subject. I have tutored kids for AP tests in all the hard sciences, all the history tests, economics, programming, and math. My wife is also a teacher.

Phazael the only data that supports what you're saying is a survey with a multiple choice question about the "primary" reason you are home schooling your kids. About 80% of people said the primary reason was they wanted to impart "a religious or moral experience" they wouldn't get in schools. Now you can't argue from that question that these people are all hardline Christians, because a "moral" experience" could be anything. I am repulsed by some of the stuff I know happens at public schools, I wouldn't have to give my kids that moral experience either. Oh and I'm an atheist, but I'd still have to check that answer. There are numerous articles criticizing the validity of the survey. You also have to explain why home schooled students do 37 percentile points better on standardized tests if they aren't being taught facts. I mean the age of the earth is a question on some of those tests, you think you're going to come out that far ahead if you put 6,000 years? No. Expand to include all the subjects (evolution, etc.) that a hardline Christian would be misteaching their kids. Yet somehow home schooled students do better, not worse, in these subjects. The assertion doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

I looked intoKahn Academya few years ago for some supplemental stuff for my kids. They have some really great resources for both home schooling as well as just anything extra they you want to learn/teach.

The Master_sl said:

Assuming you home schooled your kids from the start Khane, do you really think you you wouldn't be ready by the time they hit high school? You'd have eight years of data on how well you were doing. I mean you'd either know you were ready to teach them that material, or you'd hire tutors. Or you'd do what ends up happening to a lot of home schooled kids: community colleges is a pretty close to mirror to advanced high school classes (depending on the CC). You can start your kids in CC at 16, they can transfer to a four year school at 18 with a huge head start and either graduate by 20 or study abroad, enjoy college life, etc., with much less stress. This is ignoring the enormous, and growing, number of resources out there for home schooling. The number of students being home schooled doubled since 2007. And yes, I have absolute confidence I could teach my kids any HS subject. I have tutored kids for AP tests in all the hard sciences, all the history tests, economics, programming, and math. My wife is also a teacher.

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Eh, I'll just say this. If you have an average, middle of the road student as a child you'll have no problem. If you have an advanced student as a child it would be a bit more difficult that you guys are letting on. I was just speaking from inside my own little box which is a bad habit of mine.

The Master_sl said:

Phazael the only data that supports what you're saying is a survey with a multiple choice question about the "primary" reason you are home schooling your kids. About 80% of people said the primary reason was they wanted to impart "a religious or moral experience" they wouldn't get in schools. Now you can't argue from that question that these people are all hardline Christians, because a "moral" experience" could be anything. I am repulsed by some of the stuff I know happens at public schools, I wouldn't have to give my kids that moral experience either. Oh and I'm an atheist, but I'd still have to check that answer. There are numerous articles criticizing the validity of the survey. You also have to explain why home schooled students do 37 percentile points better on standardized tests if they aren't being taught facts. I mean the age of the earth is a question on some of those tests, you think you're going to come out that far ahead if you put 6,000 years? No. Expand to include all the subjects (evolution, etc.) that a hardline Christian would be misteaching their kids. Yet somehow home schooled students do better, not worse, in these subjects. The assertion doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

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Hardline christian is not the same thing as young earth creationist. Most American home schooled students are from hardcore Christian families. If you as an atheist are considering it, that doesn't alter that truth.

Khane_sl said:

Eh, I'll just say this. If you have an average, middle of the road student as a child you'll have no problem. If you have an advanced student as a child it would be a bit more difficult that you guys are letting on. I was just speaking from inside my own little box which is a bad habit of mine.

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How advanced does your child need to be to confound an adult? If your child is so advanced that he's getting ahead of the material, he'd only benefit more from homeschool curriculum which can alter to his pace.