Thursday, April 21, 2005

Homeschool is 30 TIMES more effective then public school

Homeschool is 30 TIMES more effective then public school.

That is a pretty outrageous statement.

Here I why I say so. In the book "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. On page 145 he finds that how interested the students were in the passage was thirty times more important that how "readable" the passage was.

How can we test this? Well, how long was it before you or your children started public school before the answer to the question, "What did you do today in school?" was "Nothing." Months, weeks, days?
Did you ever ask the question, "Is this going to be on the test?" You ask that question to know if you can go off somewhere else in your imagination for a while.
Is school boring? Of course it is. Few teachers can find the common interests of 20-30 children and link it to the lesson. It is easier in classes like band or art because the students in those classes are interested in those subjects, oh wait they've been cancelled for more "teaching" time.

Is "Punished by Rewards" the only place that says this? No, another place is "Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience." He is not interested in education as such. The author was just looking for why some people excel and others don't doing the same task. Flow is found in a balance between challenge and skill otherwise known as being "in the zone". An example of flow, have you ever read a good book, a real page-turner, you start after dinner and the next thing you know you are closing the back cover and its 2 in the morning. Or playing basketball and you are hitting most every shot. That's flow.
It comes down to this, if you are interested in doing something it is much easier to do then not.

One more place, "The Design of Everyday Things" this is a book on how the way things are designed effects how we use them. He talks about taught helplessness, You are in a situation like math class where it keeps moving forward at a relentless pace and if you miss a simple point you are completely lost because it is expected that you have mastered everything that has come before. So you end up with arithmaphobia.

Even if Alfie is off by a factor of 10, I will still do a 3 times better job of teaching my children then any teacher will.

Is there any school district that doesn't say that students do better with parental involvement? Mainly because parents are interested in their child's success like no one else. Again if you are interested you will retain 30 times more information then otherwise.

If I am already interested with what my child is doing at school then why can't I just take over the whole thing and do it at home where I can make sure my child is learning things that are linked to her interests?

1 comment:

Victoria said...

Sounds good to me...