-
But to bring it back around to teaching your kids from home, given the issues you've raised, teaching your children yourself would give you the time to do both. The 1-on-1 nature means you'd bosh through it faster too. (obvs I do get where your original issue stemmed from)
The challenges for me from listening to peoples personal accounts are:
- Skills: you need at least one parent to be competent enough to teach all the subjects. Most bright people could do this up to secondary school, but past that? GCSE's probably, but not necessarily all the subjects. A-levels?
- System: if you can't do 1. then, in our system, what is jumping into secondary school going to be like for them? 6th form college would probably be less brutal I'd guess? How/when do you make that call?
- Costs: Everyone I've heard talk about it says they did loads of extracurricular / after school activities and subsequently had a great number and more varied mix of friends. No one ever mentions how their family afforded to send their kids to all these clubs and live on one person's income. Maybe I'm naive and you can do 5 d/w of free clubs.
- Skills: you need at least one parent to be competent enough to teach all the subjects. Most bright people could do this up to secondary school, but past that? GCSE's probably, but not necessarily all the subjects. A-levels?
hugo7-
Agree with these, my Y9 daughter has needs that mainstream struggle to meet so she doesn't thrive there. Educationally she has really enjoyed me teaching her as she feels she is learning much faster and things making more sense ( not surprising given the teacher has to deal with 30 kids at a time rather than me dealing with 1.) However she is really missing friends (guess this is where clubs come in and it is really time consuming as I have to teach myself the subject first to then be able to teach her. I actually find it interesting and realise how much interesting stuff they taught us that I didn't appreciate at the time but yeh, trying to balance that with work is super time consuming, I am far from an idiot but I haven't had to think about how mitochondria work or the underlying themes in Romeo and Juliet for twenty years so takes some revising. I have had had to neglect some subjects as I just don't have the time to do this around work and know she won't be taking them for GCSE but it is a loss to her general knowledge.
-
My point was more, "don't complain about schools not teaching x, y, z when maybe that should be your responsibility and they struggle to find the resources to teach a, b, c".
If home schooling is your (not you personally) solution to that then fill your boots, but I wouldn't be as confident as you about most people's ability to teach at primary school level. Early years numeracy and literacy isn't easy to teach well (there's a reason teachers qualify) and I don't know your experience, but I found supporting my kids' in maths in particular became more difficult as they approached year 6 - more related to the way it is now taught, so I guess I could have learned that with more time. A level chemistry, forget it.
On the extra curricular stuff, mine did loads of free or cheap as chips activities - swimming, ballet, boxing, football, horse riding, drama, art - outside of school, but I'm sure it is more easily available in London with free (for them) public transport.
greentricky
Markyboy
100% this.
Schools are underfunded, teachers criminally underpaid, ministers have no proverbial skin in the game having overwhelmingly been privately educated and sending their kids to private schools, so the system that many choose to criticise continues to creak. In the circumstances, I would prefer schools to teach what they are eminently better at doing than I am, and I'll spend time on the other stuff.