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Homeschooling Q&A: Are you qualified to teach?
- This topic has 18 replies, 15 voices, and was last updated 14 years, 9 months ago by
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I’m quite often tempted to say, “I don’t have a degree in culinary arts, but I can cook meals for my family. I don’t have a CDL, but I drive my children everywhere. I don’t have an accounting degree, but I manage the family finances…etc.” Sigh. I usually answer with a version of mrsjamiesouth’s thought. 🙂 It seems to me that if my public school education left me too stupid to educate my own children, why on earth would I send them through the same system? 🙂
I haven’t had to answer this question yet, but here’s my answer: I taught ALL high school subjects for three years at an ABEKA school, and the students (and I) got through them OK. Surely I can do the same with my own. I’ll be able to give my two children more individual attention than I could give twelve high schoolers, and I won’t have as much to plan/study.
I used to be asked about high school when my senior son was just starting high school, but now anyone that knows him can see than he’s smarter than me anyway. I just tell them that I’ve found great books and he’s really good at learning from them without much help from me. We can learn together; I don’t already have to know everything he’ll ever need to learn. I haven’t met a school teacher that knew everything all children need to learn-that’s impossible. Do we really ONLY want our kids to know what the school teacher knows or only what we already know?
As for special needs-don’t we all have them?
I have not been asked the question “Are you qualified to teach?” but I wholeheartedly agree with mrsjamiesouth! Any high school graduate should be able to teach another student the things they learned during their own High School education. If not, what good did that highly valued ps education do for them?
As we move into the higher math and science courses with my oldest daughter, I know that we will experience challenges, but there are so many resources out there to help. We’ve (and I do mean “we”) have been learning pre-Algebra (me,re-learning) and stuff does come back to you. We’ve also been doing Apologia’s General science and I’ve found that I need to read the chapters she working on too, so that I can help her understand any difficult concepts. I’m getting an education myself; some concepts are distantly familar and some things are brand new to me (could it be that there are “GAPS” in a ps education, too?), especially creation science concepts. That information was NEVER taught in any of my hs or college courses!
I’ve always reminded myself on bad days, when the yellow school bus looks inviting, that if my kids were going to public school, I’d be doing the same teaching, just in the evening, as I’d be helping them with homework and with concepts they didn’t understand and the teacher didn’t have the time to really explain to them, plus undoing all the “socialization” they dealt with and picked up over the course of the day.
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