Month: July 2009

When I first moved into my house years ago and bought my own first dryer, I hooked it up. I loaded up my clothes, changed my settings and hit start. I heard the buzzer go off later and checked my clothes. They were damp. I didn’t get it. I got a dead dryer? I was about to get frustrated when my father asked if I checked the breaker. Apparently, the breaker the dryer was on was two sets of breakers instead of two tied together. He was right, a breaker was tripped. It was enough to spin, but not to heat.

Fast forward to yesterday. Danielle has been using the dryer, but she’s been noticing that it’s been drying less and less. I check the exhaust. It’s practically clogged tight. I clean it out and test it again. No go. Still not heating. So I pull the dryer out and look in the shop. I have two dryers from who knows where so I pull one of those out. I drag it all the way up front and plug it in. I change the settings and hit start. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Doesn’t even spin. I think great, this was the dead one of the bunch. I go get the other. Plug it in (all the while, I am thankful that the plugs are the same and I don’t have to change out cords), change my settings and hit start. Nothing again. I’m about to get frustrated. I start tearing apart the back thinking I’ll take the heating elements out of one and try it in the one I know that spins. While doing this, I grab my voltmeter. I decide to test the plug. I cross the two poles. 80V? That can’t be right. I try each pole to ground. One has 120, the other, nothing. So I go to the breaker box. I try the two poles. Let’s just say it’s not 220V. So I test each breaker separately to discover that the top breaker is just not working right. I take the breaker out and use an ohm meter. Nothing. Bad breaker.

Now to drag all the dryers back to where they came from. Ugh.

So lately I’ve heard a lot about home schooling. Danielle feels the same way I do about it. We sat down a little bit ago and did a little bit of Googling. I find it amazing how some people become so wrapped up in the good things they hear, and don’t think about the bad. As I keep hearing about these differing opinions, I feel the need to rant, and give my own opinion.

I went to public school my entire life. I road the bus everyday. I had “free” lunch which means I couldn’t get anything from the “A La Carte” line (no pizza for me). During different periods, I was picked on. I was certainly not the popular kid in class (well, unless they attempted to cheat of me). I feel that these things made me a better person. I may not have been a social butterfly, but I did learn how to deal with different people.

From what I read on some websites, most home-schooling parents seem very arrogant. They talk about how their kids are better educated for being home-schooled. When someone brings up the issue that their child may not be very well “socialized”, they claim their child is. Funny that you never hear anything from the child themselves talking about their many bountiful friends or lack thereof. I read in one place about how all public schools teach is how to be proud and get better grades than other kids… but yet HSP (Home Schooling Parents) do it so their kids will be “smarter”.

Being that home-schooled children aren’t in socialized environments and don’t get structure from anyone but their parents, they become a bit awkward. I know some home schooled kids. My neighbors kids are home-schooled half the week. Their 9 year old son one time came up to me and asked me about my house. He was wondering when I was moving out so that his father could buy my house and turn it into a studio. He didn’t even think that it would not be an acceptable question to ask someone you barely know. Their daughter the other day came up to the front door, and I opened it to see what she wanted, and she immediately walked in and let her dog loose in my house without asking and said “He wants to see the inside of your house.” I feel like they are missing something vital when it comes to structure, but am not sure if it is the parenting, or the teaching. These might be okay at their house, but unless they leave their house, they won’t learn that it is not acceptable in other places. It’s not so much that they won’t socialize, but how they socialize.

What is really annoying to me is when HSPs do it because they think there child is getting a poor education and the system is not working for them. The system requires a parent’s help. If the child is not getting proper discipline at home, they are going to have problems at school. If the parent isn’t encouraging self-learning at home through studying, they will do poorly in school. A better education is not going to museums and parks everyday. These are things you should be doing with your child anyway on weekends and at night while they are not in school. Not sending them off to soccer practice. The school system is not designed for letting your child go for a few hours a day, they come back, and then they are fully educated with no need of the parents to do anything. Read to your children. Teach them things. Involve them. But you don’t need them 24/7 to do that.

The real problem is the people that think it’s trendy to home-school. People who have no skills to be a “teacher” or better yet, an “educator”. I’m sure that many of the well-educated home-schooled children were being taught by someone who had a knack to teach academics or was someone who had a degree in teaching at some point. When I think of these people that grow up so close to their parents, those are the people I will be hiring one day. And I can only hope that they will be mature enough to realize that they are not the center of the universe, that you don’t work and decide what YOU want to do for me, that you work the way I tell you to.

A lot of HSP’s will say that their children will get to learn what they are interested in. And what I feel is that this is the only thing they will focus on. The problem is, what they might be interested in (or what the parents think they might be and push) may not be something they can become productive members of society with. My child might only be interested in playing video games over why when you mix these two colored liquids it bubbles over. But that doesn’t mean I will foster his playing of video games. I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I was about 16 or 17 years old. And even then, it took me several more years to actually start pursuing that to a greater extent. Just because a 7 year old is interested in firefighting doesn’t mean that they will become a firefighter. They are 7 years old. They can’t self-learn yet.

I am reading through one site as I read this, and there is a part about how their child can braid their dogs hair, play with Legos, and read books. So it seems that while they are doing this learning process, they have other things to “entertain” them. When they enter the workforce as adults, they may not have those entertainments anymore. They may have to sit in a cubicle and sit in meetings. I learned by sitting in class at public school (and having already studied ahead and therefore already know what’s going on) and be patient without entertainment. I learned focus. Focus on the teacher. Focus on your superior. Not on myself.

I really need to stop writing. The site I am reading is really starting to get me riled up as I read it. It blows my mind when I hear some of these arguments. Some are good. Some are bad though. Some children may be able to deal with homeschool better than others. Some parents may be better at it than others. The amazing thing that I learned at public school is tolerance of other people’s opinions. I have my own and will voice them from time to time, but I wouldn’t call someone a “moron” because they aren’t for homeschooling and went to public school, so they must be a moron, like some of the selfish people on the blog I am reading would do.

I want to find some home schooled people and I want to hear their thoughts. If you know any of them, please let me know how they feel about being home schooled.