Reason Number 10,541 to homeschool:

NYPost:

Would it bother you to know that the federal Centers for Disease Control had been shown your daughter’s health records to see how she responded to an STD/teen-pregnancy-prevention program? How about if the federal Department of Education and Department of Labor scrutinized your son’s academic performance to see if he should be “encouraged” to leave high school early to learn a trade? Would you think the government was intruding on your territory as a parent?
Under regulations the Obama Department of Education released this month, these scenarios could become reality. The department has taken a giant step toward creating a de facto national student database that will track students by their personal information from preschool through career. Although current federal law prohibits this, the department decided to ignore Congress and, in effect, rewrite the law. Student privacy and parental authority will suffer.

How did it happen? Buried within the enormous 2009 stimulus bill were provisions encouraging states to develop data systems for collecting copious information on public-school kids. To qualify for stimulus money, states had to agree to build such systems according to federally dictated standards. So all 50 states either now maintain or are capable of maintaining extensive databases on public-school students.

It bothers me. And my kids are grown now.

Think about it.

Saxon Math is said to aid learning.

But they don’t use the same vocabulary everyone else does and we had a hard time working with the dual vocabularies.

So, be aware.

The Common Room’s “Homeschooling the Little Ones” refers to a British study which found:

Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.

After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King’s College London confidently declares: “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades.”

I will say that it isn’t true of my boys. But they had a lot of time to play, which is The Common Room’s note.

E needs physics this summer. I had him scheduled to take one class at one college and one class at another. It wasn’t a good match, but it worked.

However, having looked at the book again this afternoon to find out where E was, I discovered that he cannot take this class. It lasts all summer, not just first session. And it interferes with his math.

There is a night class that wouldn’t interfere, but it is also all summer and doesn’t work since he needs two semesters. I guess he’ll study physics at home.

I’m wondering whether to take his books back or to keep them and have him read through them and do the workbook. Then I could give him credit for physics from me for high school, though obviously we wouldn’t be able to do a lot of the experiments.

I’m camped outside his classroom door and whenever he gets let out for break, which will hopefully be soon, we will head out to look at the book and decide what to do.

Dang it! I should have known it was too easy when we actually could get what he needed in the summer.

Update: No, no. It wasn’t an oopsie when I did it, but it was almost an oopsie when I took him out today.

I waited for an hour outside his classroom, told him the class wouldn’t work, and, then, as we were leaving, grabbed the summer schedule and found out that he was, in fact, in the right class and it will work.

The issue was I was looking online and that only had courses that were still open. His class was filled.

Thankfully the break was long enough to take him out, talk about it, check on the class, and put him back in. I am fairly sure he is annoyed with me, but at least we didn’t actually leave before the class was over.

I didn’t know I was going to be here till 4 pm, though I should have. And I should have gotten him to pack a peanut butter sandwich to tide him through the hours.

This week we have received three invitations to high school graduations. All are from very close friends, three of my five closest aside from my hubby, and are for their eldest sons who are the same age as my eldest son. All three boys are valedictorians of their classes.

My son isn’t graduating until August. He will graduate with 5.5 years of math, 7 years of English, 7 years of social science, 4 years of science… He’s done a lot.

He won’t be valedictorian and he won’t be graduating in May though.

It’s hard, sometimes, when life doesn’t look like your friends’ lives.

But he has a 3.6 average and he’ll have a total of 31 credits when he finishes. Texas requires 24 credits. He will also be a college junior because he will have taken 23 college classes.

But he’s not valedictorian and he didn’t graduate this week.

Homeschooling Goes Mainstream says:

Though parents and tutors have been teaching children in the home for centuries, in the late 1960s and 1970s there emerged for the first time in the United States a political movement that adopted this practice as a radical, countercultural critique of the public education system. Conservatives who felt the public schools had sold out to secularism and progressivism joined with progressives who felt the public schools were bastions of conservative conformity to challenge the notion that all children should attend them. By the early 1990s they had won the right to home school in every state.
…
Journalist Peter Beinart found that Wichita’s 1,500 home-schooling families had created “three bands, a choir, a bowling group, a math club, a 4-H Club, boy- and girl-scout troops, a debate team, a yearly musical, two libraries and a cap-and-gown graduation.” “Home-schooled” children were meeting in warehouses or business centers for classes “in algebra, English, science, swimming, accounting, sewing, public speaking, and Tae Kwan Do.”

Maybe soon colleges will quit requiring GEDs for homeschoolers.

As a homeschooling mom, I was appalled to hear that an on air journalist referred to homeschoolers as demented. Joy Behar was on The View

Start at 5:50… That’s where they begin the discussion.

7:10 “A lot of them are demented when they’re homeschooled.”

E is going to college and has been for the last two years. But he is a dual credit student. He started when he was 14. Clearly he is brilliant 😉 but now it is time to apply for colleges.

E doesn’t have a clear idea of what colleges he wants to go to. He does, however, know what he wants to do. He wants to be an actuary.

What we did
So, we went online and found colleges with Actuarial Science programs. Then we went to USNews and got the list of the best actuarial science programs. Then we compared the two. We started, of course, looking for Texas schools. There are four: UT Austin, UT San Antonio, Baylor, and TCU. Only UT Austin is in the best list. E doesn’t want to go to Baylor or TCU of course. (He’s an atheist.) That leaves UTSA as his second choice school. The minimum SAT from a Texas school they want is 920. It’s 1020 if you are homeschooled. So he has almost double the homeschool requirement. I would expect that he will not have any trouble at all getting into UTSA.

We’d like him to go to a good school for actuaries. Then we were looking for family or friends near enough to visit him.

I found a list of supposed good schools, but it is by a prof from ISU, so who knows if ISU really belongs on the system. But the other choices were interesting.

Boston University
University of Central Florida
Florida State University
Georgia State University
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Illinois State University
University of Iowa
Middle Tennessee State University
Pennsylvania State University
Temple University
Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Actuary.com has a list of schools based on whether they have the degree and whether classes support the first “four” exams… It is organized by region, which is nice.

Ball State (Indiana) looks good.
ISU looks good too, based on this website. Maybe it is just really good in Actuarial Science and not so good in others.
Maryville University in St. Louis also looks good. It’s a couple of hours from our friends, which is farther away than I wanted E, but it looks like a possibility. (Their website says it is one of 35 great ones, but it doesn’t say where I can find this list.) Cost, FYI, is $25,000 a year tuition and housing.

R says I’ve been too wimpy, rather than too tough, on the possible places to apply. So Wharton Business School might be added to the places he applies. I honestly can’t imagine him getting in, but I guess it is possible.

NAU, my dad’s alma mater, has a degree too. And according to their website E is guaranteed admission. That, of course, tells us that it is way too easy. I called my dad and he said don’t go. He said he’s glad he got the degree, but it doesn’t have a strong reputation.

Why am I still looking at colleges?

I am still looking because we only had a list of five and some of those are pretty hard to get into. So I am looking for others.

In the Wall Street Journal and in Pajamas Media.

Both electronic and print media are talking about homeschooling. I guess it has become mainstream.

A great quote from the PM article:

The secret of home-schooling, however, is that you don’t have to be a master teacher to do it well. Energy, dedication, and good materials are what you need. Your competition, meanwhile, is a system that by design and necessity seeks the median. Public (and many private) school students have to move along in all subjects at a similar pace, and in the same order.