Primary and Secondary School Alternatives

Submitted by fyl on 26 June, 2007 - 20:16.

I was thinking about people's concerns with Spanish-only schools and the general quality of education here. That got me thinking about my friend Willy who had home schooled his kids and how amazing they turned out. Here is my compromise idea.

Most schools here are half-day. So, enroll your kid(s) in a regular, half-day, Spanish-only school. The challenge with be that it is in Spanish plus they will be learning about Nicaragua instead of where they came from. (They should do very well in the simple English classes that are usually included.)

Then, add a bit of home schooling. Teach the English you feel they need and anything else you see missing from their "regular" school. They will have the time because of the half-day schedule and this should not be a lot of work for you because it is just a supplement to what is being publically taught.

I actually think this kind of a mix might also work well in the US if you could get a school system to buy it. The socialization aspect of public school is important but addressing learning styles, special interests and specific abilities is not the specialty of a regular school.

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Reasons for homeschooling

Submitted by mjt on 9 May, 2008 - 22:45.

Many of the reasons usually offered for homeschooling in the U.S. might apply so well to a country like Nicaragua (not to single it out; the same situation exists in much of the Latin world), that a parent might just look it over and opt out of the half-day Nica part at the outset -- unless the socialization or Spanish-language aspect was the only concern. It would not be that terribly hard to accomplish in an hour or so at home what is done in several daily hours in the average Nica public or cheap private school. This is not to pick on or belittle the teachers who do care and try with the limited resources they are offered, but many of the average schools barely merit the word "school", and most of what goes on there is far from "academic".

Socialization and culture

Submitted by fyl on 10 May, 2008 - 04:56.

I see them as the two biggest things to gain in the current school system here. To put that in perspective, while I had some useful classes in my high school and college days, most were not. I was in honors everything in high school, for example, but had zero motivation to do well in them. I was always interested in learning new things (and still am) but the typical classroom environment wasn't what was going to work for me.

Because I was self-motivated to learn what interested me (at the time, primarily electronics) I used my non-mandatory in school time to pretty much home school myself. Clearly, my career was a function of educating myself with the "college piece of paper" just necessary to open some doors.

Based on how I learned, for me a half-day school would have been better for me. That is, I would have learned more but still would have received the socialization I needed. For someone moving from the U.S. or Europe, the culture side is going to be very important here as well.

It is likely when we move to the Geek Ranch property that our niece will move there with us. (She has a choice but picking living with us has some pluses for her.) Should that happen, my idea would be to put her in the public school for socialization but invest about an hour a day filling in the pieces.

She is like I was in school. Generally uninterested in "you have to learn this" but smart and interested in learning things she finds useful. That list includes most anything from computers to how to fix a car.

Gains

Submitted by mjt on 12 May, 2008 - 00:06.

I don't doubt the value of the two things, but might doubt that the public schools are necessarily the best ways to achieve such ends (there are others means/locales of socialization and the language-learning for a young person is rarely an obstacle). I suspect many students are today as you were when a high school student. The problem though is that while then in the U.S. you perhaps could have found other similar students who might have shared your interests and self-instruction - which may have been akin to a hobby. In Central America though, the average student doesn't have hobbies (they require money). And, self-instruction requires access to, if not money, at least books and materials, things which are hard to come by in Central America. One option is to compensate for such things in the homeschool time. But, for a student like you (back then) this time will quickly become the focus of the day, and this focus will not likely involve those students from the socialization time - which will make it seem that much more important, and might make smart students wonder what the point is to the half-day in school (though the question would rarely come until it is too late: "instead of compensating for a mediocre school, why not send me to a good school?"). Part of the argument toward homeschooling is that the socialization is not a one way street and may or may not be as valuable as previously believed. The other possible problem with the analogy is that while in the U.S. you could have taken advantage of the system were you more motivated or pressured to do so; in Nicaragua, there is no system to take advantage of. While the classroom did not work for you in what might have been an o.k. school, it may well work against students in bad schools. As a general rule students do not do well across any decent curriculum without having ever studied or read or paid attention to reasonably decent lectures. If you did well in the U.S., you likely did some or all of these things - even if you were not motivated to do so. Doing such things in Nicaragua would be a monumentally greater challenge, assuming one has access to the materials and/or lectures. While a student with access to extra lessons to compensate for a weaker school or generic knowledge might do much better, I would not want to work off any assumption regarding the otherwise equal nature of Nicaraguan and U.S. schools (not U.S. now, and certainly not when you were in school); what a "home teacher" might compensate for in the two different countries would be very different, and there might not be any comparable playing field. In some countries the goal of the home school is to go beyond what is covered in the day school, but in some other countries the home school is to make up for and recover what is badly covered or not even attempted in the day school.

Home-schoolers gain college acceptance

Submitted by barrettjewel on 9 May, 2008 - 10:12.

Home-schoolers gain college acceptance Admissions requirements are changing

Monday, February 25, 2008 SUZANNE PARDINGTON The Oregonian Staff

Jenny Grant's transcript was written by her mom. Her classroom was her home and community. And her idea of a high school sport was fencing. The problem was proving it.

As the number of home-schoolers multiplies, more students such as Grant are making the leap from home to college, creating new challenges for students and colleges alike.

The number of home-schoolers in higher education is hard to determine because colleges typically don't track them the way they do other groups such as international or minority students.

But colleges nationally say they are seeing greater numbers of home-schooled applicants as more parents choose to teach their children at home.

The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that 1.1 million K-12 students were educated at home in the United States in 2003, a 29 percent increase from 1999.

As those students reach college age, they first have to convince admissions offices that they are prepared for college-level work and then adjust to education in a formal setting.

Grant, 19, says it's a myth that home-schoolers have a harder time socially and academically in college than other students. And colleges are starting to get that message.

Like many home-schoolers, she had to take responsibility for her own education from an early age as she shuttled between classes and activities. Her high school education was a patchwork of independent study, private tutoring with other home-schoolers, correspondence classes and community college.

By the time she enrolled at Portland State University last fall, she felt more prepared for the freedom of college life than many other freshmen.

"I was already pretty independent, I was just living at home," she says. "I'm here, and I'm not attached by an umbilical cord."

Her parents decided to try home schooling in California while Grant was on the waiting list for second grade in her local public school, which was full. Her mom, Amy Grant, had never heard of home schooling until she met two moms who were doing it.

By the time a spot opened at the public school, they liked home schooling so much they decided not to enroll.

Jenny Grant says home schooling allowed her to explore ideas in more depth than she could in a formal classroom. For instance, she mummified a chicken, learned hieroglyphics and designed costumes when she was studying Egypt.

As the number of home-schoolers has multiplied, so have the reasons for doing it. Religion is still a major motivation, but more families are teaching their children at home for other personal and educational reasons.

The social and academic opportunities for home-schooled teenagers are so plentiful that the students are rarely isolated at home.

Like Grant, home-schoolers often attend group classes in homes, join sports teams, take private lessons, enroll in community college classes and get support from computer-based instructional programs.

By the time Grant reached her teens, her mother's role changed from teacher to coach, advising her as she pursued classes and activities that would prepare her for college.

She applied to seven schools and was accepted at four: Portland State, Humboldt State in California, Oregon State and Arizona State. Some schools asked for more test scores and evidence of her academic preparation than others did.

She had formal transcripts from the classes she took through correspondence, a high school technology program and Portland Community College. Her mom filled in the gaps by writing a transcript with descriptions of the work she did independently and with other home-schoolers.

"Some places you don't even want to apply to as a home-schooler, and other places are really, really welcoming," Jenny Grant says.

New attitudes, policies

Nationally, many colleges have changed their attitudes and admissions policies to accommodate home-schoolers, says Ian Slatter, spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association, a national advocacy group.

Until the late 1990s, "the home-schooler would show up and the colleges would say, 'We don't know how to deal with you,' " Slatter says. "They really didn't know what to do with a parent-issued diploma."

Since then, many colleges have found better ways to evaluate home-schoolers and other students from unconventional education backgrounds. Generally, admissions offices want to see GED, ACT, SAT, Advanced Placement test results, grades from online or community college courses and documentation from parents of the work students did at home.

Insisting on a GED is one admissions requirement that irks some home-schoolers. They see it as a credential for dropouts, and "my education is a lot more valuable than dropping out," Grant says.

Home-schoolers need to show that their studies have covered the breadth of academic subjects, including math and science, says Paul Marthers, Reed College's dean of admission. If home-schooled students avoid an area of study, they tend to be less successful, he says.

Reed gets 100 or more home-schooled applicants a year out of 3,000, and the admission rate is close to that of other students -- 33 percent last year.

"Now it's become so common, everybody knows that home-school students can be some of the more intellectually enthusiastic people," he says.

At Oregon public universities, students who don't graduate from accredited high schools have to submit more test scores than regular applicants.

College adjustment

At PSU, Grant shares a dorm room with her boyfriend and visits her family in Aloha about once a week. She cooks most of her own vegan food in her room, wakes up before dawn for crew practice and participates in several clubs, including a fencing club that she started in her second week.

She had enough community college credits to enter PSU as a sophomore, so she opted out of living with other freshmen. Instead, she lives on a floor for students who are sophomores or higher, a lot of them Japanese exchange students.

But she struggled to balance study time with her activities. She found she couldn't sustain the time commitment necessary for both the honors program and her early morning crew practices.

She also felt overwhelmed in a 170-student chemistry lecture with an instructor who had limited time to help students. She joined a study group, did all the homework, attended every lecture, but "it still just didn't seem to be clicking," she says.

In her second quarter, she dropped honors and switched to a program with smaller classes and more support. Her classes are all relevant to her major, environmental studies, and she's doing much better.

"I would rather have time to do all the other fun stuff about college, instead of studying 24 hours a day," she says.

Suzanne Pardington: 503-412-7054; spardington@news.oregonian.com

Home school thoughts

Submitted by aswicks on 27 June, 2007 - 09:09.

Greetings all,

My wife and I have home schooled 5 kids for over 20 years and have known a lot of other home school families. We still have one 16 year old son at home who is being home schooled. We have home schooled some of our children all the way through and others decided to go to public high school. Since each child has different social and educational needs we have worked with each of them to help define their goals and work toward them. As 'evets' said about the young folk that had been home schooled he had met while yachting, they often are more mature than their peers. As a parent I have never complained about this nor have I heard a lot of other parents complain that my children weren't acting immature enough :). However, just because they are more mature than their peers, they still are a lot of fun and tend to be leaders in their groups.

However, Phil's idea of having kids go to a half day Nico school could be a good idea. However, from our experience in Mexico and here in the US, there can be problems with socialization. It seems a truism that where ever we live that the kids you would rather not have your kids know are the ones with all the time to make friends with your kid whereas the really neat kids are busy in their own worlds and don't reach out to others much.

If you can instill in your children a love of learning, thinking, and asking questions and can figure out ways to use their interests as a springboard to incorporate other areas of learning that they don't exhibit a great interest in, then it is relatively easy to get them to learn. Also, remember that in a normal classroom in the US there are 20+ students so that each student may only get 5-10 minutes of one-on-one time a day. As a parent you can give a bit more time than that. Also, we don't get too upset if one of our kids decides that they aren't going to study much for a week or a month. In time it all balances so long as communication is kept open and discussions take place. All I have to do is remember my educational career and the detours I took and I am much more understanding.

Alan S. Wicks Kennewick, WA

I seem to remember

Submitted by evets on 27 June, 2007 - 08:37.

this was touched on some time ago. It is an excellent solution, it could perhaps be bettered by a cooperative where parents took it in turn to do the 'English' afternoon - OK I know most of you Gringos can't speak proper English but you'll have to do your best - that way the social element (very important) would continue and the kids would also be exposed to a broader spectrum of knowledge and attitudes.

I've been around in the yachtie world where a lot of kids are taught on the boat. They are polite, well educated but maybe too old for their years which I put down to not mixing with their peers.

On the other hand we are in a part of France where there are still school classes with a wide range of ages in one class (if you've seen the lovely film 'avoir et être' it was filmed a few miles away).They work incredibly well and both the children and teachers really enjoy them partly because it forces a more eclectic approach than the rather rigidly structured French educational system so I believe a small mixed age class could work well.

I'm not at all sure about the value of a classically structured educational system, particularly in the interesting times ahead. I believe that the ability to use a spanner/understand how things work and can be mended/cook/shoot straight(sadly)and a whole host of other practical things are more important than most of the stuff taught in school.

Perhaps the arrival of more folk in what Phil describes as the non near-dead age group [he hasn't heard the last of that from me] will make some cooperative effort possible.