2 Comments

  1. m

    All I can say is that I took my daughter out of gifted classes at the end of the second year because she hated them and allowed my son to “homeschool” the last year of high school. They were both miserable at different ends of the spectrum.

    He’s gone on to finish an AD and she , with the full scholarship, dropped out. (she’s back now but her case illustrates perfectly the notion of someone with a 4.0 who has/had no idea of what they wanted to do and wasn’t going to “get a degree” just for the satisfaction of it all.

    How is it we can put someone through 12 years of public school and have them emerge, more often than not, with no idea of where their particular intersection of talent/aptitude/and desire is located?

    If I had it to do over again they’d both be homeschooled (with meaningful resources in a meaningful way) and never allowed to set foot inside a public school.

    WHICH IS STRANGE because I was someone who was at the bottom of the social structure throughout school, they both certainly were not — a factoid I am at a loss to understand or explain. About the only advice I ever gave them was “if I hear of you bullying someone or insulting anyone I will kill you.” (It has quite an effect on a first grader, their eyes get big and round.)

    Regardless, I’m well old enough now to see far too many “winners” lose and far too many “losers” win and it’s puzzling to me, not a source of constant wonder but one worth noting with some regularity.

    Anyway, I didn’t fully explain my “homeschooling” remark. It has to do with providing an individualized curriculum for each student, each *person* because the group think rolling out of schools today isn’t very useful or satisfying and the appeal to the lowest common denominator is staggering in many instances.

    • Bookscrounger

      We homeschool; or maybe we unschool. There is very little structure to our kids’ curricula. We want them to read, write, and be able to do math, and the rest of it they pick up by reading, and osmosis. Which works; we don’t have a TV, first. And my wife and I listen to NPR, and we discuss history and science and current events. And we are fortunate to be able to take them overseas, and read to them a lot about where we’re headed. My daughter has a Rome thing going on ever since our trip. As my posts here make pretty clear, I’ve decided that most of school is pretty pointless, except for a few basic skills; and even those are only appreciated and enjoyed by a tiny minority.

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