Back in late May, I wrote about some of the consequences of putting homeschooled kids back into regular school. –a post that incidentally met a whole lot of hoopla and had charges thrown at me such as:
The key was, we did our research. We got our information. We met with the teachers, looked over the curricula, sat in on classes, talked to the principal, got to know the other kids our kids were spending time with, and kept a close eye on all of the above each time our kids joined a class. When Common Core became a reality in our school, we met after school with the curriculum director and found out exactly what changes will be made, and why. When the kids got up to units of study that we thought might be problematic (things like medieval history or environmental studies or health class), we made sure our kids knew the truth, and encouraged them to present it to the class if it wasn’t being covered by the teacher. In most cases, it turned out the teachers were not eager for controversy, and were respectful and accommodating.
So to unpack that a bit – with regard to the curriculum, if you really want to still be a part of the process with the newly -schooled child, there will be meetings with teachers, principal and the school board. Fisher met with teachers, the principal and curriculum director. They spent extra time going over the curricula, getting to know the other kids by “spending time” with them and then teaching units ahead of time so that they could handle misinformation in class.
Seems to me that if not having enough time to adequately homeschool is the problem, you might want to reconsider. Homeschooling isn’t as much work and time intensive as trying to oversee the school curriculum and environment.
Another way would be to understand that your child’s school experience will be affected by the way that child’s particular school is run. In some schools, wild and damaged children will be allowed to bully and injure your children. In other schools, discipline will be handled wisely and reasonably, so that both your child and her “attention starved peers,” who are surely just as important as Matt Walsh’s children, will be given what they need.That is what most teachers and school administrators are there to do: to try to give children what they need. Sometimes bureaucracy will make it harder for them to do this
Fisher seems to back up that point as well – the child’s school experience will be affected by the teachers, administrators and other children in the school. That’s just a fact of sending a child to an institutional school. It is what it is, and Fisher’s experience also bears that out. For a student trying to survive in the academic institutional setting, those relationships are crucial
My original post had been written to fill a need I saw at the time. A lot of people I personally know have put their children back into public and private schooling – some happily, and some not so much. I had seen many articles and posts on the difficulties of pulling a kid out of school to homeschool them but I had never seen the reverse until I wrote a post about it – based on my own experiential anecdotes, not fear, fallacy or an attempt to just blatantly lie to folks. So I feel somewhat vindicated to see an article that inadvertently backs up a few of the points I was trying to make.
