We leave our acoustic guitar on a stand. It works out great. We had a case but never, ever used it.

I do think that, at the college/university level, a more interactive approach tends to be more effective than just lecturing. Part of the problem is that often lectures just reiterate material found in the textbook and course readings. So, students either do the reading and tune out the lecture (or skip class), or use the lecture as a replacement for doing the reading. IME, really excellent lecturers--while they are out there--are few and far between. Most professors who lecture just stand up in the front of the class and summarize the textbook readings. It's very frustrating for students who actually did the reading (I know I stopped attending a number of lecture classes in college because that's exactly what happened), and it discourages other students from doing the reading at all. But I'd be very hesitant to read too much into these results. For one thing, short-term retention of information doesn't necessarily mean more learning has occurred. I'd want to see what would happen if they checked back in with the students at the end of the term. For another, I totally agree that novelty could have been a big part of the results. A longer-term study would definitely be needed.

I think this is important. Yes, I'm sure educational neglect happens, but in nearly all serious cases, I have no doubt it's coupled with other forms of abuse and neglect. And, honestly, in those cases the educational neglect is probably a far less pressing issue than the other forms of neglect and abuse in the home. If the other forms of abuse/neglect are addressed, either by removing the child from the home or more closely monitoring the family, then I'd assume the educational issues would be taken care of, too. What do you mean? Why do you blame the schools for this? I'd agree that few young people can be fully-functioning independent adults at 18. However, I don't think the schools are to blame. 18-year-olds 50 and 100 years ago were no better educated than our young people, and in reality they probably had fewer academic skills. Our young people simply lack the opportunities to be independent adults. If we want young people to be ready for adulthood faster, then let's make sure that a hard-working young person with a high school diploma can, if they want, obtain a job paying enough that they could support themselves--and perhaps even a family--on it. Not lavishly, but at the very least meet the basic needs of themselves and perhaps a spouse and child. But we do not offer that. The unemployment rate for under 25s is 52%; the "underemployment" rate is significantly higher. These young people want jobs. They want to be independent. But the opportunities are not there for them, yet we turn around and blame them (and maybe their teachers) for the situation.

When my DS was in preschool, we were literally sick from October to May every year. I'm not exaggerating. I don't think we'd have a single day between those months where somebody in the house wasn't sick with something, and often more than one of us was sick. This year I watched a friend's baby for six weeks, and his older siblings were in preschool. And, what do you know, after about two years of rarely being sick, we were sick from about a week after I started watching him until maybe two weeks after we stopped. Little kids pass on a lot of germs. We could always pretty much guarantee that, if we took DS to play in the little playscape in the local mall, we'd be sick within days.

FWIW, many classroom teachers aren't certified, either. Private school teachers often don't have to be certified, and aren't. Post-secondary instructors aren't certified teachers, either, and many receive no pedagogical training at all before they enter the classroom. (I teach college writing and have no certification, although I have taken pedagogy courses. I don't know any college instructors who weren't first K-12 teachers who have a teaching certificate.)

I generally make my dough in the bread machine and then bake it in the oven. I don't like the way the loaves come out when baked in the machine. They're just kind of unwieldy. I used to always use bread flour, but now I use all-purpose flour most of the time. I just don't see enough of a difference, and I always have AP flour on hand.

I think it's because most homeschooling parents are good, loving parents invested in their child's education, and it's very hard for them to understand that there are unfortunately parents out there who are completely, totally, and profoundly uninterested in their child being educated. In some cases, they are even outright hostile to the idea. And I think that both makes it very easy to assume that the problem with public schools MUST lay with the teachers and administrators and their methods (rather than with the home environment, even though research has indicated that it's home environment that makes by far the largest difference in educational outcomes), and to assume that most if not nearly all students would be better off educated at home than educated in a public school. Thankfully, most parents who don't care at all about their child's education send them to public school, so at least the students are getting an education. (And I admire the teachers who are working with these kids so much, because they and the kids are up against enormous odds.) They don't generally keep them home and deny them an education.

Are you claiming that 30-40% of students in our schools--most of which take a balanced approach--are coming out unable to read? I would love to see some stats to back that up. I have quite honestly NEVER met a person who went to a decent public school (i.e., not a really horrible inner city school) and/or who had parents even minimally interested in their education and who didn't have an LD of some sort who was actually unable to read, no matter how they were taught. It's certainly possible, as well, that the reason the tutoring works is because it's one-on-one. One-on-one instruction of any sort is likely to be far more effective than classroom instruction of any sort. I'm guessing that most students coming from a phonics-heavy traditional classroom would still end up faring better in a one-on-one whole language environment. That's why homeschoolers generally have better educational outcomes than traditionally-schooled children, whether those homeschooled kids were trained rigorously in phonics and grammar or were radically unschooled. It's not that homeschoolers just use better methods than classroom teachers, because we know that homeschoolers use wildly different methods, but that they can invest a ton of one-on-one time in their students. It's not the method that matters as much as the setting, and one-on-one instruction will pretty much always trump a classroom. We can't compare educational techniques by comparing how the outcomes of one in a traditional classroom setting with the other in a one-on-one tutoring setting.

That's the problem, though. It's important for most kids, but fails for others. And, teachers are charged with making sure every student comes out of their classrooms having met certain objectives. Sure, that doesn't happen in practice, but it is the intent, and so any method that will not work at all for a subset of students is of course going to come under fire. The other thing I think we need to realize is that phonics works best in the context of a language-rich environment. For students coming from homes where they are read to, where books are all around, where they are even just talked to a lot, an exclusive phonics approach can work very well. But, unfortunately that's not the case for all students. Many teachers are dealing with students who are not just never read to or don't have books in their homes, but who aren't even spoken to very much (there's been some interesting work done on how different cultural groups relate to their children and how little verbal interaction there is with children in some of them). For those students, exclusive phonics is going to be far less effective. But, again, today the educational trend is toward a blended/balanced approach--teaching phonics formally but within a language-rich classroom environment (items are labelled with their names, students are read to, etc.)--and that's been the case for the last 15 years or so. We really can't blame anything, education-wise, on a lack of phonics, because exclusive whole language fell out of favor in the early-to-mid 90s and since then it's extremely rare to find a classroom where formal phonics isn't taught in some way. As a homeschooling parent, I'm a big fan of phonics. My son learned to read pretty much on his own by 4, in a "whole language" home environment, but I did some some formal phonics work with him to help the process along when he was 3 and expressed an interest in being a more proficient reader. I won't hesitate to use formal phonics when teaching my other children. But, if I had to teach a classroom of 25 or 30 students coming from a wide range of backgrounds with a wide range of abilities, I would absolutely feel like I needed to incorporate some whole-language instruction (the kind of thing that's just part of growing up in our house) into the curriculum.

As hard as it is to pin down, I think intent matters. If a parent has the intention of educating their child in the way they see fit, but that way is different from what I or the local school district or the government thinks is appropriate, I may feel badly for the child, but I do think the parent has the right to direct their child's education. If that means radical unschooling, or using the Bible as the only textbook, or using textbooks from the 1800s only, or whatever educational choice I might personally disagree with and think isn't very effective or useful, as long as the intention of the parent is to provide their child with an education that will prepare them for life, I do think that they should be free to do so. At the very least, once the child is 18, they'll be free to pursue their own education, and as long as they have some degree of basic skills, they can do so. That's why things like the Amish ending formal schooling in eighth grade doesn't bother me in the slightest. It works for their community, and nothing is stopping a person from pursuing more education on their own or formally once they reach adulthood. But, if the parents' intention is to leave their child uneducated--which I do think is very rarely the case, but unfortunately sometimes is, especially in households where there are other forms of abuse and neglect--then I do think the state has not just the right, but the obligation to step in and make sure the child receives an education. That said, though, I have no problem with some regulation of homeschooling. Quite honestly I wish Michigan, the state where I live, had more standards. There is no regulation of homeschooling at all. I could simply allow my son to play video games all day, while forbidding him to read books, and there is no system in place to make sure that's not happening. That worries me. I think a great deal of leeway is needed, but I also think that the rights of children matter and should be protected, and I count the right to an education among them. It's a delicate balance, no doubt, but I am very wary of moving too far to the "parental rights" side, because children have so few rights in the U.S. and I'd hate to see the few they have be dismissed or overturned.

Is she? I do think it's important to recognize that being prepared for college is not--and absolutely should not--be the same as having acquired basic math and literacy skills. The problem, I think, is partly that we have conflated the two. We've decided that "basic competency" now means "able to handle college-level work." I'm not sure that's ever been the case before, and I don't think it should be the case. Placing into a remedial college course doesn't and shouldn't mean that a student lacks basic skills. It simply means that the student is not ready for the kind of advanced academic work they'll be expected to do in college. As an example, students in my introductory composition classes are expected not just to be able to understand the main idea of a text written on a 10th grade level or able to construct an understandable and coherent paragraph (things that I'd consider basic skills--I do not consider a perfect grasp of grammar to be a basic skill, because most adults I know, educated back when phonics was taught exclusively and grammar was taught via drill, don't have anything approaching a perfect grasp of grammar. If anything, my older students struggle more with the mechanics of their writing than my traditional-age students). They are expected to be able to make and support an argument in writing in a clear and logical way, to read advanced texts critically (picking out the main idea, following the line of argument, evaluating the argument), to be able to synthesize and analyze the arguments in various texts in their own writing. And, college-ready students are expected to have a firm grasp of standard English grammar; in fact, the expectation (although this is NOT the case) is that even the students in my remedial classes will have a good grasp of grammar, and so we are generally told NOT to teach grammar in our classes, and to focus on global rather than sentence-level issues. We do review those things, but students are expected to be able to do them in some rudimentary way. I don't think that's unrealistic to expect from a college-bound student. I do think, though, it's unrealistic to expect from every student. Again, the problem is that we've conflated the two. Every student is expected to be college-bound (or almost every student), and we consider them failures because they don't have those skills while at the same time accepting them into college without significantly adjusting the curriculum and expectations, so that instructors are stuck trying to teach higher-level academics to students unprepared for them. But my point is just that college preparatory skills should be a significantly different set of skills that basic skills. I have seen no convincing evidence that most students today are lacking genuinely basic skills in literacy and math, and certainly no evidence that they are somehow more lacking in skills that people two or three generations ago had; I have a lot of first-hand evidence that many students today are lacking college preparatory skills, but are still expected to attend college and are attending college. So we should not be at all shocked that many students need remedial work in college, because trying to prepare every student for college work is an impossible task for high schools and high school teachers. The more students who attend college, the more who will need remediation; I don't know why we'd expect to see anything different, or assume that's an indication that schools are failing to teach basic skills in any widespread way.

I've wondered about this myself. My son just started second grade, and I've been concerned that he isn't great with his math facts. He's really, really good with mental math--out of nowhere he'll tell us things like "Hey, twenty-four plus twelve equals thirty-six!" and we're always surprised at how much math he can figure out--but when it comes to responding to facts drills, he gets really flustered. I mean, sometimes with even really simple things like 3-2, he'll just get a deer-in-headlights look. The thing is, if he stopped to actually think about it, he'd get it in a second. But when he's asked to simply recall it, he freezes up. We're working through the Rod & Staff second grade math program right now, which I'm hoping might help him to really get his facts down. (It's not my favorite math program, though, and I doubt we'll use it next year. He goes Miquon as a supplement to satisfy his conceptual side.) But I also think maybe I need to ease up a bit and not put him on the spot so much about it. I don't know.

I'd be prepared for things to take less time than you're expecting. Your schedule looks a lot like the schedule I had envisioned for my DS when we started homeschooling (he was also in K). I had sessions for the morning and afternoon planned. Even on days where we managed to get through absolutely everything (which admittedly was not most days, although in my defense I was pregnant and then dealing with a newborn for most of the year), I don't think we ever went more than 90 minutes. And that was with an art or music lesson. Most days we were finished in 45-60 minutes. My son was reading already, though, so that probably caused us to move through things a bit more quickly than if he needed reading instruction along with other things. It's possible you'll find yourself using and wanting to use all of that time, but I'd definitely be prepared to get more done in less time than you are expecting. When you're working one-on-one, especially with a small child, you can get so much done in very little time.

Honestly, until they get dirty (dirt or food on them, the kids blowing their nose on them, something gross like that) or I realize I haven't washed them in a long time. I definitely go longer between washes in the winter than the summer.

The cutting one was a big hit here, too. Mazes, too. I would say, though, that I didn't think the Kumon workbooks--other than the two mentioned--were much more fun for DS than the Rod & Staff preschool workbooks. Those are 4 for $9--so a lot cheaper than the Kumon books--and somewhat similar, although less colorful, and would absolutely fit the bill for a little who wants to "do some school" while older siblings work. I'd probably go with the Rod & Staff set, and then pick up a couple of Kumon books that you think your child would particularly enjoy.

I'd like to think that, but I really think it's more about our current economic system being such that we have NOTHING to offer young people. There are almost no fields left in which you can leave high school and get a job that would allow you to be financially independent, much less support a family on. We have nothing to offer young people from maybe 18-25, so instead we use college as a $50K (which I just read is what the average public four-year college costs) to $125K (which is what the average private college costs) holding pen. If our economy truly needs people with more skills than in the past--because I do not believe nor have I seen evidence that the average young person today has fewer literacy or math skills than the average young person in the past--and gaining those skills requires most people to be in school an extra four years, then we should have a system in place for providing that for them that doesn't require them to go deep into debt. I just get very, very angered by what we're doing to our young people. We're basically saying to them, "Hey, kids, if you skip college you'll be lucky if you can find a job paying minimum wage. So, go spend 4-5 years in school learning stuff you don't care about and have no aptitude for, and then you can come out with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and just a slightly better chance of finding a job than you did before, which in all likelihood won't even pay enough that you can move out of your parents' house with all of the loan debt you need to pay back." Young people are starting out their lives burdened with a lot of debt, not because of poor financial choices on their part but because college costs keep rising and they have no other way to pay for it and no other options, and from what I've read there hasn't been a time in recent history when the job market has been worse for under 25s. It's just a mess, and I do think at some point it will get so bad that drastic measures will need to be taken.

I think that's probably because, in many cases, the price difference is much larger than the actual difference in quality. As mentioned, if I'm paying 30 times more for a pair of glasses, I'd expect that pair of glasses to last me 30 times as long, or to be 30 times better quality. That's not the case. At a certain point you're dealing with diminishing returns. I'm a bag person. I love bags. I find that really cheap bags ($10 and under) tend to fall apart pretty quickly. A strap falls off, a seam rips, etc. But, I've also found that once you get to a certain price, a more expensive bag is usually just more expensive, not better. The $180 diaper bag I once splurged on was no better and no longer-lasting than the $40 diaper bag I now carry. In fact, my $40 bag is better designed and has held up better. They're both much better than the $10 bags, but you'd expect that a $180 bag would be significantly higher-quality than a $40 bag, but I haven't found that to be the case. In general, I just haven't found that to be the case with any items. At a certain point I think you're just paying for the name, not for quality.

And most kids are learning those things. I get a lot of really bad students, but none are illiterate. They all can read with a basic degree of understanding. I would be willing to bet that nearly all of them can read with more proficiency than the average person a few generations ago. But, today we expect more from them. We'd consider them failures for only being able to read at a basic level, whereas a hundred years ago, that would have been an educational success. And, most people can do basic math, if by basic math we mean simple calculations, with a pencil and paper if necessary. But, again, that's not enough. We think students who can't manage algebra are failures. That's a new expectation. I really don't think enough can be said about rising educational expectations. Yes, it's totally not "homeschooling correct" to say it, but educational standards are rising, and have been for a long time. I have to admit, I do laugh when I read these accounts of what education was like back when "everybody" was classically educated, and the examples used are people like Cotton Mather or John Adams. These were the elite of society! You cannot take the educational level of the most elite in society two or three hundred years ago and compare it to the education that your average person today receives. We can certainly compare elites to elites--how does the education that John Adams got compare to the education that, say, the Bush twins or the Obama girls are getting?--or we can compare averages to averages--how does the average public school today compare to the education received by the average person in 1800? But you can't compare apples to oranges. For the average person, we have absolutely seen a rising floor of literacy. Literacy has gone from being defined as simply being able to sign one's name, to being able to read at what would now be considered a third- or fourth-grade level, all the way up to today, where it's being able to read at a tenth-grade level. So to imagine 1) that most kids today aren't learning to read or do basic math and 2) that somehow in the past the average person was more proficient at those things than your average person today is, from everything I've read about education and literacy, to misinterpret things. Yes, we absolutely could do a better job of teaching basic skills. But that would require accepting that, for some students, it may indeed take 10 or even 12 years of schooling to acquire those basic skills, and that doesn't mean they or the educational system failed. As long as we can't accept that, we'll see students rushed through the basics so that more time can be spent trying to teach the higher-level stuff we think equals a successful education.

I like this. I love my Kindle, and I'd definitely recommend one, but I wouldn't necessarily use it for children's books. I've gotten a few children's books for my Kindle, and I can't say I love reading to DS off of it. I prefer using real books for read alouds as much as possible.

How? I mean, we have school districts dropping kindergarten because they can't afford it; we certainly aren't moving towards free public preschool for every child, much less compulsory public preschool. What, specifically, do you see that indicates we're moving in this direction?

Phonics works for most children. Not all. I think a lot of people have been given a lot of misconceptions about our educational system. They've somehow been convinced that educators and administrators are these horrible, sinister people who must want kids to be uneducated and so have taken effective methods and gleefully thrown them out. Yes, phonics works for most kids. But, teachers are not expected to educate most kids, especially not as kids with LDs are increasingly mainstreamed; teachers are expected to educate ALL children in their classrooms. And, the problem with phonics is that there is a subset of students for whom it is completely, totally, and utterly ineffective. For students with certain learning disabilities, phonics is a failure. They simply cannot learn to read via phonics. So the exclusive use of phonics was creating a situation where, while most students were learning to read, some were ending up completely illiterate. We're talking about high-school aged students with no ability to do even simple decoding. Whole language doesn't have that drawback. All or nearly all students seem to read with some degree of proficiency in a whole-language environment. You could certainly argue that 1) it's slower than phonics, 2) it doesn't provide the groundwork for spelling that phonics does and so produces poorer spellers, and 3) it doesn't lead to being as strong of a reader as a phonics-based approach might. Those things are likely true for most students. But, again, schools are charged with teaching every student in their care. And if a teaching method is a complete and total failure for some students, then it's simply practical to exchange that method for one that will have some degree of success with every or nearly every student. So this isn't about ideology, but practicality. Classroom teachers are expected to teach a room full of students of a variety of levels of developmental readiness and cognitive abilities to read, and since the 1970s they've increasingly had to teach students with learning disabilities that make traditional methods ineffective right alongside everybody else. That is a terrible difficult situation to be in. No teacher or administrator would chuck something that worked great for something that didn't work; instead, what we saw was a move from a method that worked well for many students but failed entirely for others, to a method that had some degree of success for nearly all students but had some serious drawbacks for most students as well, to a blending of the two methods in the hopes that the best of each would be retained. FWIW, too, European nations went through the same changes in literacy ed as the U.S. and Canada--from exclusive phonics to whole language in the 80s and early 90s to a blended approach today (since the late 90s you'll be pretty hard-pressed to find any school that teaches whole language exclusively)--and they have had consistently high rates of literacy. It seems like, as a previous poster pointed out, the issue might not have been that the family was teaching phonics--I'd find it extremely hard to believe that classrooms in Quebec do not teach phonics at all--but that they may have been using what the judge considered a particularly outdated curriculum.

The treaty that has been around since 1989 and that every nation except the US and Somalia has ratified? The one that has clearly stripped every parent in every nation except the US and Somalia of their rights to give their child a religious upbringing? (Because certainly, say, Middle Eastern parents, living in countries that ratified the treaty, are forced to raise their kids entirely secularly.) Sorry, my hackles get raised by the opposition to this by right-wing American groups. It's such blatant fear-mongering. It's one of the reasons I would NEVER have anything to do with the HSLDA.

:lol: Exactly! Plus, I don't particularly like being tied to the same pair of glasses forever, but when I'm spending $300+ on a pair, I feel like I need to get a good 2-3 years out of them, at least.

Given the way schools are evaluated, though, this makes sense. Teacher and school effectiveness is measured by test scores, test scores take into account all students (as per NCLB), and so the students who are poor performers drag down the scores and reputation of teachers and entire schools. If a school wants to perform better in the way we currently measure performance, raising the test scores of the lowest performers is really the only way to go about it. Sure, it hurts all the other students, but the school's funding and reputation is on the line. Honestly, as awful as this is to say, after years of teaching, my only answer is "Because some people just aren't very smart." Or, to put it in a nicer way, "Some people lack an aptitude for and interest in academic pursuits." That's just how it is. I think it's ridiculous to think that we're going to get everybody to be a great writer who can think critically about history and philosophy and can understand physics and chemistry and passes precalculus. It's no more realistic, IMO, than expecting everybody to be a good basketball player or ballet dancer or pianist. Thank God for my childhood dance teacher's sake that she was not expected to have all of her students leave her class ready to enter a professional dance company. I would have been her undoing. I simply had no aptitude for ballet, and I didn't love it enough to spend the inordinate amount of time and effort it would have taken for me to become even somewhat proficient. Some people aren't very athletic; some people aren't very musical; and some people aren't very academic. It's just how it is. And I think it can be very, very difficult for people who ARE academically-inclined (which I think includes most teachers, whether homeschooling parents or teachers in traditional classrooms) to understand that. I know it can be very hard for me to understand. I get so frustrated sometimes with the students who just do NOT seem to get it, no matter how much I explain, no matter how much their classmates explain, no matter how many different explanations are tried, no matter how many questions I try to answer. But, at this point, I've come to accept that sometimes that's not because of a lack of effort on their part, or a lack of clarity on mine, but simply because the concept I'm trying to get across is beyond their capacity to understand. The way I feel when a mathematician friend tries to explain incredibly difficult and abstract concepts to me (something that is just beyond my understanding and probably beyond my capacity to understand given that I'm not a super-mathematically-inclined person) or when my husband tries to explain something about computer programming to me (which does not interest me in the slightest and so I'm not inclined to expend the mental energy I'd have to to make any sense out of it)? That's how these students feel when faced with concepts that are, to me, much more basic and much less challenging. They just DO NOT and CANNOT get it. I don't know, maybe I'm too cynical, but I really think that's it. Of course, there's also the issue of inequality and how that impacts things, and the role of family involvement in a child's education, and those do impact scores and I do think we should address those issues because those students could be performing at higher levels, but I also think we need to accept that not everybody is a scholar, or even particularly smart. That doesn't diminish their worth as a person any more than somebody not being musical or athletic or artistic or funny diminishes their worth as a person, but it is something we need to acknowledge.

Where is your evidence for this? Rather than believing there's some sort of conspiracy of radical feminists and multiculturalists who, despite having pretty much no economic or political power, managed to completely take over education for their sinister motives, it's best to look at the economics of this. Starting in the 1960s, we began to see the collapse of the American working-class. The well-paying jobs that used to be available to people without college degrees started to disappear or move overseas. So, people who would previously not have gone to college because they could have done just fine without a degree now were being pushed into higher education because there were no jobs available for them. At the same time, we saw average wages for everybody stagnate, as the cost of living rose, so more and more families required two incomes, which meant that many people who previously would not have had to enter the workforce (i.e., women) had to find a career that could support or help support their families. Because of that--because there was a sudden, large influx of students into universities who in previous generations would not have had attended college--some educational methods did have to change. But those changes were a needed response to the changing student population and changing educational needs of students (needs that changed because of economic pressure), so that more students would have more success, and not some weird radical conspiracy. If you want to blame anybody, blame the private sector for 1) requiring college degrees for positions that in no practical way actually need them, 2) compensating jobs that do not require a college degree so poorly that people cannot support themselves much less a family on those wages (full-time work at minimum wage comes out to $15,080 per year before anything is deducted), and 3) moving the few well-paying jobs that didn't require a college education overseas. That is what has created a situation where high school teachers are not simply expected to have their best students prepared for college work, but nearly all of their students, and where college instructors are now expected to teach advanced academic work to students with no aptitude for or interest in advanced academics. It's those demands that have led to changes in teaching methodologies. Those changes were absolutely necessary if the idea wasn't to provide all students with a basic education and the best students with preparation for advanced work (what we used to do, and what traditional methods work very well for), but to provide nearly all students, who come from a variety of backgrounds and with a huge range of aptitudes, with preparation for doing college-level work.