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He can still play on the basketball team, right?

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by RickStain, Dec 12, 2011.

  1. Buck

    Buck Well-Known Member

    Do you have any background, experience or education that supports your supposition that you would be good at this?
     
  2. Smash Williams

    Smash Williams Well-Known Member

    I will say, a lot of the experience with the public school system varies widely by location. I (a non-Catholic) started off in private Catholic schools because where we lived at the time, my parents didn't trust the local school system. Then we moved to another state and into one of the best districts in the city, and my public school experience was as great as it could be given that middle school girls are evil.

    Finally, we moved again before high school into another highly-touted district (upwards of 95 percent of students went on to college), and high school was great. I was one of the better educated kids in college. I also had highly motivated parents who helped me study outside of the classroom and drove me to my artsy extracurriculars.

    Rick - I think believing yourself an instant expert based on your general knowledge base and the internet is extremely dangerous. I totally understand where you're coming from, but while I feel like I know a lot about medicine, I'm not qualified to diagnose other people or especially myself. There's a difference in being knowledgeable and being educated enough to teach it to someone else. Early elementary education is one thing, but AP biology is another.

    There's a great book out there on how the "instant expert, just add water" phenomenon of the internet has actually led to more mistakes out there since people rely on their on flawed interpretations of data and not those who are truly educated, but I can't remember the title for the life of me.

    Finally, many of these things you want to teach him can be done outside of school, whether on weekend father-son outings, over the summer/spring break/Christmas or simply after-school bonding time. Just because you aren't his official teacher doesn't mean he won't learn all those things from you.
     
  3. Buck

    Buck Well-Known Member

    But a school setting provides for academic opportunity and social opportunity. It does not take the place of parenting.
    You would still be the parent, the one in charge of teaching him all of that non-academic stuff. The difference would be he would have day-to-day interaction with other kids, providing him the opportunity to see the necessity and efficacy of what you're teaching him.
     
  4. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Nope, but that doesn't particularly shake my confidence. There is very little that I don't have complete and total faith in myself to accomplish if I have the time and motivation. That sounds both arrogant and like a general, meaningless platitude, but I believe it to be true.

    But that's what this next year (and this thread specifically) are for. I need to learn exactly how much there is that I don't know about this before I truly pull the trigger. Still plenty of time to bail out if I'm in over my head.
     
  5. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    But Rick, the only one who's going to suffer if you fail is your child. And you may not even know you're failing. You may think you're doing a bang-up job, but the kid is miserable, and he gets mocked at his Boy Scout meetings when you leave, and he gets atomic wedgies at the park.

    Your confidence is a great thing. But don't let it blind you to the downside if you don't succeed.
     
  6. YGBFKM

    YGBFKM Guest

    I hope you're better at homeschooling than you are at naming threads.
     
  7. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    If you really want to give the kid an education have them read SJ on a daily basis as part of their curriculum.
     
  8. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    That's a very, very good point and definitely a line of thought that has to be explored. I don't want to be coming off as dismissing it. But arrogant or not, I know myself and I find it very unlikely that self-doubt in my own ability to effectively teach is going to be a dealbreaker on this one.

    This is probably because I consider myself to be more or less entirely self-taught. My formal education was about interminable days spent listening to a teacher drone on about stuff that I had read about on my own and understood perfectly many years earlier.

    From kindergarten through college, I can only think of one subject where I felt like I was actually intellectually stimulated or challenged in any way: I took a class in high school on using QBasic to write programs that did calculus problems. Actually having taken calculus was supposed to be a pre-req, but I talked my school into letting me take it early. I had to rev the ol' effort meter up to about 20% on that one instead of the usual idle mode.


    At the end of the day, I don't have to be better than the professional teachers. I just have to be a tiny fraction as good because of the extreme handicaps they face.
     
  9. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Putting him in public schools won't exactly innoculate him from that.

    I can see a lot of scenarios:

    1) Homeschooling leads him to become socially stunted
    2) He's socially inept by nature and homeschooling protects him from the brunt of the negative experiences until he's old enough that it doesn't matter so much (i.e. an adult).
    3) Through alternative socialization methods (i.e. putting him with other kids every chance we can besides school), he becomes well-socialized.

    It's about assigning odds and risk-reward. If I feel like No. 3 is likely, then there's no problem. If I feel like it's impossible or very unlikely, then there's a big problem.

    And like I said in the initial post, there's more to socialization than having friends your own age. We all know people who may have been the life of the high-school party but don't know how to comport themselves in adult-on-adult situations.
     
  10. waterytart

    waterytart Active Member

    Both sides of the family have started asking when our 13-year-old daughter can visit them solo. The last two times we've flown, she's handled everything as far as checking us in, finding the gate, etc. Doesn't mean I won't be neurotic about putting her on a plane by herself sometime in the next year, but it won't be because I think she can't navigate an airport.
     
  11. YGBFKM

    YGBFKM Guest

    It's going to matter for the great majority of his life. Often, it matters more as an adult. I understand wanting to protect him, but at some point, you have to send him out into the world, and doing so with no ammo, as it were, seems like you're not only forestalling the inevitable, but making the inevitable 100 times worse.
     
  12. Smash Williams

    Smash Williams Well-Known Member

    As a person with social difficulties, I can tell you the best thing my parents ever did for me was leave me in a school with average kids. It was a terrible experience at times, but it taught me so many things I needed to know as an adult. If I didn't learn those lessons then, I likely wouldn't be employable now. Kids are ruthless, but that's a great teacher about how to interact in a group and the general social rules (how to hold a conversation, how to share ideas fairly, how weird hairstyles or clothing might look cool but draw negative reaction).

    It's much, much harder to deal with being socially stunted as a college kid or adult than it is in kindergarten or elementary school. Kids are given leeway and taught. Adults are expected to know better.

    And again, kid-with-adult situations don't teach kids how to interact as adults because there are different social guidelines. You can't expect an adult to interact with an 8 year old like they do another adult, so the 8 year old isn't learning how to interact with a peer group.
     
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