The Public School Parents' Guide to Homeschool Parents

Kris over at weird, unsocialized homeschoolers put up a post back in April of this year addressing a lot of the more common misconceptions surrounding homeschooling. Being somewhat new to the whole homeschooling thing, it took me a while to stumble across this post (thanks Michelle!).


I am glad that I did because she *nailed* it.


And the last one that she addressed - #11: The fact that I happen to have a teaching license that doesn't make me a better homeschooling parent - is the one I want to focus on for the moment.


I am a certified K-12 educator. My degree is in Exercise Science and my endorsements are in Physical Education and Health though I also have enough credits to add in Science and Math if I wanted to. I have taught in Colorado, California, Alaska, and Hawaii - mostly at the high school and middle school levels.


What I have found over the course of the past 6 weeks of homeschooling is that I am having to unlearn a lot of my teacher education in order to properly educate my children. First, let me say this...my college education did not properly prepare me to teach. Not even close. EVERYTHING that I have learned about how to teach has been learned either in the classroom or at my dining table (or in other settings in which I work with children such as church). Today's "teacher education programs" do not teach people HOW to teach. They teach you how to manage a classroom, how to write out a lesson plan, how to develop scope and sequence within a curriculum, how to protect yourself from liability. But they do not teach you HOW to teach. And I don't think they have for decades.


I love math. LOVE it. I have math workbooks on my nightstand instead of trashy novels. I love to do math problems. But, as much as I love to *do* math problems, I am not particularly skilled at teaching others how to do them. I am learning and plan to use my love of math and science (combined with improved teaching skills) as a tutor once we find out where we're going next but those teaching skills are something I'm having to teach myself because it was never really taught to me in college.


So the fact that I am a certified teacher really does not equip me any more than simply being able to read and understand the directions in the teacher's manual that came with the curriculum I chose for my children. Like Kris said in her post, you're going to have to come up with a better excuse than that if you want to tell me why you can't homeschool your own children!


It's a great post and Kris does an excellent job of articulating a lot of the thoughts that run through my mind when I hear my friends discussing our decision to homeschool our children.


Our Week-In-Review is going to be late this time around - we have QUITE the full weekend going on! I managed to get next week's lesson plans laid out early but I had to sacrifice the WIR in order to do so. And our week wasn't all that interesting anyway!




Pau.




- hfs