RE: Agile education and pragmatic schooling

Public schools teach to the masses, which is unquestionably problematic.
People learn in different ways.  Public schools tend to concentrate on
the learning of facts, instead of learning to learn.  Public schools
fail to teach emotional intelligence, which can be more important in
many ways than traditional intelligence (yes, I said this to a bunch of
geeks).

Presumably, by homeschooling your children, you believe that you can
resolve these issues as well as others.  If, in fact, you can resolve
these issues for your own children, why not help others?  I browsed
through the Greater Portland Homeschoolers website that was previously
mentioned.  Obviously, you have spent some time organizing people and
materials.  Why not extend this into an actual school?

Creating new schools would allow greater collaboration of resources.  It
would also give more public visibility to the performance of your
alternative education.  It would provide you with a greater ability to
make observations on the effectiveness of techiniques.  It would also
give you (I believe) more credibility in the educational world and allow
you to help remove the "fringe" label that is often associated with
homeschooling.

Please don't view this as an attack.  I'm honestly curious, because if
someone were to go this route, I'd be eager to help them.

PS - Perhaps we should be developing a formula for education, instead of
a formula for hit movies!


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Wattier [mailto:geek-22ODmZXh/+qN1Hz4/vYZJQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 1:16 AM
To: pragprog-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [pragprog] Agile education and pragmatic schooling

Hi,

Well, I am the programmer/geek in my household and I'm 100%
pro-homeschooling 
for my son, my wife is starting to come around due to the miserable 
performance of the public schools. Our small town ranks 3rd from last in
test 
scores grades 3-11. It is virtually impossible to hire a local
programmer, or 
even some kind of apprentice here. Walmart opened up a store here a year
ago, 
took 1300 applications, 725+ of them failed the (very basic) math test.
400 
of those failures were recent HS grads.  My son was 2 at that time and I
made 
the decision to start pumping his head as full of "stuff" as he could 
possibly stand.

> I'd be curious to hear what
> age you introduce your children to computers. 

My son types on the computer I got him every day for the last 8-10
months, He 
has always liked to bang on the keyboard since thats what he sees dad do

every day. He now knows his alphabet without singing it, can recognize
every 
letter without pause and their  and now is moving on to actually typing 
email. Now, I have to admit that his vocabulary is still quite small :)
and 
his email's are limited to "mom" and "hi" and things like that.. but for
3 
years old it's not bad :)

I saw a recent news item that talked about how kids who were exposed to 
computers/internet earlier did "some noteworthy percentage" better on 
research and problem solving test areas than kids with little or no
computer/
internet access. 

>We've mostly been holding
> off thus far, but I'd expect by the age of 6 to have some educational
> games to let her play by herself at times.

while I do not claim to be any kind of expert in the field, I can tell
you 
this dont wait for anything - push information at them through any
channel 
you think is right for your child. Flash cards at 1-1/2 is fine.
personally, 
I read the book see-spot-run by myself when I was 2, I had read the old 
testament by the time I was 4. All due to my mom shoving flashcards &
books 
in my face from the day I was born and refusing to stop until my
teachers 
didnt know what to do with me :)


Have fun
Mike













 
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