[rescue] Beginner VAX

[joshua d boyd]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 01:58:05PM -0400, sambo at charm.net wrote:

> Jacob has also accused them of being the way they are in a twisted
> attempt to get him to rebel and swing far to the right.

> Heh. He obviously doesn't understand his parents all that well.

Don't most kids?  I think I still probably don't understand my parents all
that well, and I'm sure I'm significantly older than he is.  My parents
tell me that they didn't understand their parents until they were parents
themselves.

> Anyway, I bought a home-school 1st grade curriculum for my daughter, and
> she breezed right through it, bored as could be. She *wants* to go to
> school.

First, keep in mind that these are just my theories, and I'm not trying to
represent them as truth.

>From what I've seen, most pre-packaged home-school curriculums are rather
poor.  Most of the try to emulate schools at home, and that seems like a
bad idea to me.  If you are trying to act like a normal school, but at
home, then why not just send your kids to a good private school?

I think a better approach, especially for young kids, is to let them learn
(and do) what they want.  I think that a key part of this is not letting
them watch TV (not saying that TV is evil) when young, and not
letting them play video games much when young.  I'm sure there should be
some moderation here, but I don't think allowing them to do what they want
can work if they establish TV or video game addiction at a young
age.  This seems to be something that John Taylor Gatto (New York state
teacher of the year once, New York city teacher of the year numerous
times) agrees with.  Sooner or later, I think they will want to do the
essentials of math and reading, as soon as the find a reason to want 
to.  For instance, both are handy as one gets better with legos (for some
boys at least).  

> There was apoint here. Oh yeah, we plan, our kids do. It's all well and
> good that mr. boyd would like to home-school his eventual kids. Could be
> he'll even attempt it (don't forget it's generally the mother who does
> most of the work, while we fathers are out earning enough to support
> these activities), but they have to want to do it too.

Yes, I know that it would be the mother who does most of the work.  That
has been a topic of discussion with my girlfriend (who was an education
major by the way).  I doubt think that I would be as likely to homeschool
if I were to marry someone who didn't want to.  What I don't know is if
willingness to homeschool is something that I would hold as a criteria in
finding a wife.  If my girlfriend is "the one", then whether I consider it
an important criteria won't be an issue.

Yes, kids have to want to do it too for it to work, especially as kids get
older.  I think that for most kids, the only reasons they don't want to
are if their parents are inadequate at educating them, peer presure (I
rather suspect that Jacob above would be a case of peer presure, based
on the rebelion complaints), or lack of socialization.  Dealing with peer
presure and lack of socialization can be problematic in some areas.  For
instance, where I live, I don't have very many friends who were
homeschool.  

Many of the local homeschoolers (at least the ones I met), are
homeschooled for reasons like their parents felt there were too many
ungodly influences in schools.  They can't relate to music other than the
extremely sugary christian stuff they listen too, they miss almost all
cultural references, they are shocked if men cook, or women don't.  My
sister was criticized by local homeschooling girls because she doesn't
really cook or clean.  They wanted to know how her husband would eat if
she didn't cook for him.  Anyway, I think you can understand why we didn't
get along that well.  On the upside, we have some friends from church, and
friends from other locales (homeschoolers from the york PA area are much
different, as are ones from Pittsburgh).

> Or something.

It's not like I'm in a hurry to have kids any time soon.  It is something
I think about from time to time.  I think about education more often, an
interest largely jumpstarted by the work of Seymour Papert and Minsky.  I
have a copy of Mindstorms (the name of the legos being taken from the book
I'm led to believe) on my bookshelf at home.

Anyway, have I suitably alienated people yet?  Feel free to start
laughing, but if you have [coke|pepsi|code red], you might want to look
away from [monitor|keyboard|wife] first to avoid unneeded mess.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd