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If your children have never been in "real" school, share some myths that they may ha


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My dd has never been in school.

 

So she thinks that the teacher patiently stands by for a full 55 minutes of class explaining over and over again until each student has a full understanding of every concept.

 

She also thinks that every kid in the class is friends with everyone else. So every kid has like 25 close friends.

 

She thinks that everyone is happy cheerful and kind all of the time.

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The teacher is there to 'help' but that doesn't mean they hold your hand through every paper.

 

You get stuck working with kids even when you can't stand them, they are mean, or they punch you in the face. Some parents let their children watch Bride of Chucky at age 8 and they share all of the details because kids are like that and then dd has nightmares for ages.

 

Recess is only 15 minutes. And that includes the time it takes to get in like, get out the door, play, get back in line and get back to class. And it only occurs 2x week.

 

You will get bad grades if you don't do your homework. Your homework consists of endless worksheets on top of anything you didn't finish during the day at school (in our experience).

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Ds thinks the kids who go to ps are "normal" (as opposed to those of us deranged enough to be hs-ing).

 

They think (due to a friend's enthusiastic descriptions) that breakfast is an all you can eat extravaganza of pancakes, muffins, donuts and sausages (and that I would allow them to eat that every day if they attended there). Oh, and lunch consist of pizza, hamburgers and spaghetti every day, and if they don't like what's on the menu they can choose something else that they really like that day (LOL!).

 

They think the kids get really long recesses outside every day (not sure why, since it's obvious the ps next door has outside recess maybe 35% of the time). The long part is because they see the swarm of kids out there for a couple of hours, but they don't realize they're switching out every 15-20 min.

 

Ds thinks "real" teachers (as opposed to his mom who has a MEd in Elem Ed and Spec Ed and 6 years of teaching in classrooms) always know the exact diplomatic thing to say and proper way to explain each concept so that students get knowledge practically by osmosis, so they never have the pain of mistakes or embarrassment of ignorance.

 

Ds thinks he would be happy spending 6 or more hours in a structured setting every day. He is delusional about the amount of homework he would (not) have to do every night. He does not realize that most kids' parents also participate in the instructional process almost every night.

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And field trips, pajama days, muffins with moms, assemblies, field days, movie days, and parties! The girls at dance make PS sound like unschooling in a group or something.

 

And maybe they are-the moms at dance all complain about the amount of homework their girls have, and that half of it is skills that their child apparently hasn't been taught at school yet, so they have to teach it at home. As one mom puts it "How about having the TEACHER teach her to divide, and I'll take her to the zoo??"

Edited by dmmetler
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Art class is every day. For at least 2 hours.

 

Science is daily, and there are experiments each day.

 

The rest of the day consists of recess, lunch and singing songs.

 

Like the OP, all the children are kind and supportive, and they are all close friends.

 

He hasn't mentioned this, but I suspect his vision of school also includes the sun shining every day, except for a few perfect snow days a la Frosty the Snowman. :tongue_smilie:

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Ds thinks "real" teachers (as opposed to his mom who has a MEd in Elem Ed and Spec Ed and 6 years of teaching in classrooms) always know the exact diplomatic thing to say and proper way to explain each concept so that students get knowledge practically by osmosis, so they never have the pain of mistakes or embarrassment of ignorance.

 

Ds thinks he would be happy spending 6 or more hours in a structured setting every day. He is delusional about the amount of homework he would (not) have to do every night. He does not realize that most kids' parents also participate in the instructional process almost every night.

 

This is also what my dd thinks, especially the bolded.

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My son thinks it is an awful place where he would forced to be away from me all day.... I have explained it but tried not to make it sound scary. He just does not want to be away from his family all the time.

consider yourself blessed.

 

Actually, my 2 younger girls agree with this. But my oldest considers regular school to be all sunshine and rainbows.

 

I do know that the kids in school are NOT playing video games right now. Something that my dd is doing right now. Time to get to work!

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My son thinks it is an awful place where he would forced to be away from me all day.... I have explained it but tried not to make it sound scary. He just does not want to be away from his family all the time.

 

:iagree: my dd pities kids in school, despite lots of talks about different choices being right for different families.

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Apparantly mine thinks she would be allowed to talk during tests and speak out loud to demand an answer to a question no matter if the teacher is helping someone else at the time. She thinks the teacher would help her find her pencil that she dropped and where she set her book that she was just using. The ever patient teacher would jump to get her a sweater when she is cold. Basically the woman would be at her beck and call and answer all of her whims all day with a smile. Apparantly each child gets their own teacher, because of course she would be doing this for everyone :)

 

At least this is just what she expects of me...

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My Dh is a ps teacher so most of my son's understanding of ps is very one-sided. What he does think about ps tends to be true, but negative. He doesn't get the whole picture.

 

The only totally off-base thought he has about ps is that everyone there is miserable. He can't understand how anyone, but especially boys, can be made to sit in a chair and write ALL DAY LONG. I think he ranks a public school classroom right up there with waterboarding.

 

Both of my children understand the value of public education as a choice for families. Dh is a ps teacher & our daughter went to ps for first grade. I think my daughter's negative experiences coupled with Dad's dinner-time naughty kid stories has created a bit of a negative view of ps in general. Though most of his stories leave us laughing hysterically.

Edited by Daisy
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Sorry, this got kind of long but I hope it helps you a little bit. Oops, I wrote more to the child than to the OP. I misunderstood what you were asking. :)

 

The teacher doesn't have time to explain things too many times. My children used to come home and I would have to sit with them and help them learn the material. Sometimes, the way they learned HOW to do something was confusing and I would have to show them other ways to learn the same thing. My youngest dd found math very frustrating because the methods weren't logical. But we had to work together to get her to learn those particular methods because she would get a bad grade if the problems weren't worked exactly that one way on her tests.

 

All the kids are definitely not friends, I'm really sorry to tell you. Every year while my youngest dd was in elementary school, we enrolled her because she wanted to be around other children and she wanted to make friends. This went on from 1st grade through 5th year. And each year she would come home after a couple of months because school wasn't like she expected it to be. Each year, she would make friends with 1 or maybe 2 other kids, but never outside the school. She only saw them in school because parents were always too busy or too tired to drive their children to other people's houses. And there really were kids that were just plain mean. She came home from school on many occasions feeling so sad or upset that she cried. But she tried her best to deal with it because she was so certain that if she kept trying she would make lots of friends. But it never worked, not in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th grades. In 5th grade, we decided to stop trying to make public school work and instead we focused on making homeschool great.

 

Another thing that really bothered my dd was having to study subjects she wasn't interested in studying, and even worse, working on a level that was boring for her. Public school couldn't allow her to study anything in the next grade because all kids in one grade had to be on the same schedule studying the exact same material. With homeschool, she sometimes has to study things that don't interest her, but we can approach the material in different ways that suits her. We do it all in a personal way which school can never do because there are too many kids in one class.

 

When she left public school in 5th grade to start homeschooling again, she decided it would be better to have no friends than to try to deal with the big mess of public school. But we did manage to find her a couple of really good friends. She met them in some homeschool classes and has been friends with them for a couple of years now.

 

Here are some of her favorite things about homeschooling. She doesn't have to wake up as early as she did when she was in school. So that means she doesn't have to go to bed as early either. We can plan days off school that other kids don't have. She can get her homeschool work done in much less time than in public school. She was in school for 7.5 hours every day and then had to come home and do homework for over an hour, but at home she finishes her work in about 3 hours and has the rest of the day to do whatever she wants to do. She likes that she can work at anytime too. She isn't forced to do language arts at 8:00am and then math at 8:45am. She might do math first and then take a little break before she does something else. She feels important because she's learning how to set her own schedule, something the kids in public school aren't allowed to do. She's going to be really ready for college when she graduates high school.

 

School can be an okay place but it's not all rainbows and sunshine every day. Homeschool is what you decide to make it, but public school is really what everyone else makes it to be for you.

Edited by Night Elf
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Thankfully, my kids have experienced both. I say "thankfully" only in that they now know the difference between the two! They still seem to regard me the same way 2_girls_mommy's dd's view her BUT I think they really do enjoy being at home more.

 

I know my daughter does! But I think that's mostly because I've learned to recognize the signs of an Aspie meltdown, don't have 24 other students to deal with, and can take some time to help her through it.

 

If my 7yo son wasn't it vastly ahead of his peers in reading and comprehensive ability, and didn't carry on conversations like he was 20, he might do well in public school! But when you're that different from your peers, the ps playground (and hallways sometimes) is just an invitation to bullying or shunning. At least being homeschooled, we plan times to be around other homeschooled kids where he's understood most of the time.

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My daughters think "real" school work is easier than homeschool school work. To be fair, that would probably be true for one of them. For the other, absolutely not.

 

They also seem to have this strange impression that their chores would magically disappear if they went to school. They don't really grasp the whole "get up, feed the pets, make the beds, eat, get dressed, go to school, come home, do homework, do chores, eat dinner, go to X activity, shower, and squeeze in playing wherever you can fit it" reality, which is odd since they've seen their brother do it.

With our local school's schedule and bus route, they'd be gone from 7:30ish to 4:30ish, so the above list is nearly impossible to squeeze in comfortably.

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My boys say funny things about school, but one of the funniest things I've heard is a friend's dd when she was younger was saying she wanted to go to school to learn stuff. The friend finally asked her what she wanted to learn and her dd was like, "Important stuff like somersaults that kids learn in school." Ha.

 

I think my boys just see it as a strange way of life. They always look with a bit of pity on schoolchildren.

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And maybe they are-the moms at dance all complain about the amount of homework their girls have, and that half of it is skills that their child apparently hasn't been taught at school yet, so they have to teach it at home. As one mom puts it "How about having the TEACHER teach her to divide, and I'll take her to the zoo??"

 

That was my experience with my older dd in her first four years of ps. That is why we pulled her out. We were doing hours of school work at home and our relationship was suffering from trying to do school work that came home with not instructions and was due tomorrow. Meanwhile the kids had LOADS of fun every day in school. Lots of hand on activities that taught concepts that my dd never retained, and no practical school work. That was for moms to do.

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Apparantly mine thinks she would be allowed to talk during tests and speak out loud to demand an answer to a question no matter if the teacher is helping someone else at the time. She thinks the teacher would help her find her pencil that she dropped and where she set her book that she was just using. The ever patient teacher would jump to get her a sweater when she is cold. Basically the woman would be at her beck and call and answer all of her whims all day with a smile. Apparantly each child gets their own teacher, because of course she would be doing this for everyone :)

 

At least this is just what she expects of me...

 

What is my dd doing at your house?

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My DS has asked to never go back! We'll see if he keeps feeling this way.

 

We live in a very good school district, and all three schools we are zoned for are some of the best in the state. So, even with a great school, we ran into problems.

 

The focus is on teaching the grade-level concepts. For last quarter of the year, the teacher is works with the lower-performing children to bring them up to grade. So if your child is in average or above, they spend a lot of time doing worksheets or with their heads on the desk.

 

Discipline was very strict in the school. No talking during lunch except for a brief two to three minute period. Lunch is 20 minutes long, including time walking to the cafeteria and leaving. I knew rambunctious boys who came home everyday for weeks on end with a note from the teacher. These weren't bad kids; they just were active. At least two moms told me their boys didn't see the benefit in trying to be good because they would get in trouble anyways.

 

The bus rides remind me of "Lord of the Flies." If you have a lax bus driver, your kids will be harrassed.

 

The bus comes at 6:30 AM, meaning dc must be up by 6:00 for breakfast and getting ready.

 

The teacher might teach dc the concept wrong and the parents spend hours at home deciphering the methodology and struggling not to mutter, "Your teacher is a sweetheart, but she knows nothing about math."

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My first grader says he would hate it because he would have to be away from me for three hours and the teacher wouldn't read with him. Imagine his shock when I told him it would actually be 6 hours. "No WAY would I want to do THAT!"

 

My fifth grader thinks it would be "just a whole bunch of school with my brain overloaded and basically no play time, with only one short break. But I'd like friends and lunch."

 

My third grader says he just doesn't know but he wants to have school at home because he doesn't want to do homework.

 

They have both public schooled and homeschooled friends. His ps friends seem to think that hs is mostly playing all day and no homework, so they tell him they wish they could be homeschooled.

 

ETA: I guess these aren't really misperceptions, just their opinions of what public school would be like. They DO think that they'd get to eat lunch in the school cafeteria every day. As if. Even my dear friend who is the lunch lady at her kids' school doesn't let her kids eat hot lunch every day.

 

Cat

Edited by myfunnybunch
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I knew rambunctious boys who came home everyday for weeks on end with a note from the teacher. These weren't bad kids; they just were active. At least two moms told me their boys didn't see the benefit in trying to be good because they would get in trouble anyways.

 

This would be my son. One of the main reasons we homeschool. He's active and distractible and would be a disaster without the exercise and free time he gets at home.

 

Cat

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This would be my son. One of the main reasons we homeschool. He's active and distractible and would be a disaster without the exercise and free time he gets at home.

 

Cat

 

My heart broke when hearing this from friends. These boys were sweet kids, just not the traditional "good" kids, as in they didn't always stay on task, sit in their seat quietly, finish their worksheet without using a pencil to shoot a friend, etc. I don't blame the teachers or the school. I just think oftentimes the institutional nature of public schooling makes it hard for square pegs to fit in the round hole.

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Kids at school get very little actual instruction, and most of the day is spent standing in line and moving from one class to another. (Oh, wait. That's a myth I've seen homeschool moms make. ;))

 

My DD was homeschooled until the middle of third grade. I can't think of any myths she had about school, but her day was much more structured and scheduled than she expected, with very little down time.

Edited by WordGirl
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My kids don't know of any school myths. Just last week for some reason I mentioned the word recess and they didn't know what that was.

 

Everything they know about school is pretty general and all true. (ie. you go after breakfast, come home sometime between lunch and dinner. You don't get to be in the same class as your older/younger brother)

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My youngest considered going to high school this year. BUt she quickly gave up the idea. She rightly decided that the school day would start earlier and she likes to sleep later. She also rightly decided that in some classes she would be bored but in others she might be made fun of because she has problems with spelling. The funny thing is that on her robotics team, she is the secretary and the expert on the rules because she is the best writer and speller of the group (even though she does really have a problem).

 

Basically my kids just thought that school kids didn't have the freedom they did although the youngest used to think it was mean of me to require learning in the summer. She has changed her mind and now thinks it is a good idea so you can learn more.

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Kids at school get very little actual instruction, and most of the day is spent standing in line and moving from one class to another. (Oh, wait. That's a myth I've seen homeschool moms make. ;))

 

 

 

For an awful lot of people that is no myth. I experienced it for myself in public school, and this is one reason I homeschool.

 

I've heard fairy tales about better school situations and I do try to believe them.

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She also thinks that every kid in the class is friends with everyone else. So every kid has like 25 close friends.

 

She thinks that everyone is happy cheerful and kind all of the time.

 

:iagree: My oldest knows better since she went to ps for half a year, but my ds has this notion that ps is just a big funny party with your friends! :lol:

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My daughter is also under the impression that everyone in ps is best friends and that lunch and recess take up most of the day. She also believes that when she is working on an assignment she would have ABSOLUTE SILENCE in which to concentrate on her work, unlike at home where she has a little brother who often does annoying, noisy things like um, breathe.

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For an awful lot of people that is no myth. I experienced it for myself in public school, and this is one reason I homeschool.

 

I've heard fairy tales about better school situations and I do try to believe them.

 

The majority of the time you were walking between rooms or standing in line? For several hours a day? Sorry, but I don't buy it.

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My kids thought that there would be a huge buffet cafeteria, and they could slide their tray along piling up mac 'n cheese, jello and cupcakes. Ha.

 

They thought that when you eat lunch, you can actually relax, take your time, and socalize with your friends. They had no idea they had to scarf it down before a bell rang, and that they wouldn't be allowed to get up and talk to anyone not at their table while it was "eating" time.

 

They thought that recess would be much longer, and that they would be free to run around and do whatever they wanted. They had no idea there would be so many rules about where you can run and what lines you had to stay inside and what ball you could use when.

 

They thought that teachers would just be enthralled to listen to their endless ideas and questions.

 

They thought that all the kids would be their new best friends.

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The majority of the time you were walking between rooms or standing in line? For several hours a day? Sorry, but I don't buy it.

 

Add in waiting for a teacher to call you up for individualized instruction, waiting for everyone else to finish an assignment, waiting for your turn at...whatever, and you'll add an amazing amount of time to a child's day.

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The majority of the time you were walking between rooms or standing in line? For several hours a day? Sorry, but I don't buy it.

 

To be perfectly honest, I didn't start clock-watching until third grade. I distinctly remember sitting in that classroom and realizing for the first time that I could watch my day being wasted, minute by minute. (I never belonged in ps.)

 

I wouldn't swear on a stack of Bibles that I spent the majority of the day standing in line, but my overall memory of school was a near-total lack of worthwhile instruction or stimulation, sitting for hours, and standing in line.

 

I don't want my children to look back on their childhood that way. I'm going for hours with books, laughing and conversation with siblings and parents, meaningful activities, and plenty of free time to explore and think.

 

Add in waiting for a teacher to call you up for individualized instruction, waiting for everyone else to finish an assignment, waiting for your turn at...whatever, and you'll add an amazing amount of time to a child's day.

 

:iagree: Like Dr. Seuss's "Waiting Place."

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My daughter is also under the impression that everyone in ps is best friends and that lunch and recess take up most of the day. She also believes that when she is working on an assignment she would have ABSOLUTE SILENCE in which to concentrate on her work, unlike at home where she has a little brother who often does annoying, noisy things like um, breathe.

 

Oh my goodness. I forgot that one on my list of things my dd believes. But she totally does too!

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My freshman aged son is convinced that he is completely missing out from public school because he could go visit with his friends all day AND once he's done at school, he'd have no homework or responsibilities.

 

Ironically, my 7th grade daughter goes to school for band and art classes and often begs us to let her stay home. She does not understand why any parent would send their kids to ps all day long torture. Don't they love them?

 

My second son occasionally asks when he's going to be smart enough to go to public school. Poor kid.

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The high school guidance counselor actally guides you through what college to apply to, how to apply, what career field to go in to, how to manage your homework, p.t. job and extra curriculars and other sundy aspects of your life. :lol:

The school bus is FUN. (I actually saw s*x abuse on ours and had my wrist broken on the bus).

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My DD went to public Pre-K which was play-based and the kids had complete control and choice about what they wanted to do.

 

So my DD wants to go to K because:

 

you get to spend as long as you want at the craft table - the whole time you are there if you want

 

you play outside in the huge yard for an hour every day

 

if you ask the teacher for more materials to finish your art project she will get them for you from anywhere and anything you request

 

you don't have to do writing and reading

 

you can wear a princess dress from the dress up corner all day long even when playing outside or doing craft

 

you can eat your snack whenever you choose

 

the teacher and 4 aides wander the classroom just waiting to interact with any students who calls them over

 

you never have to sit at a desk or chair unless you want to -you can wander the classroom all day just checking things out and chatting with everyone else

 

:lol::lol::lol:

 

 

Once I explained to my DD that when she went to K she would have to wear a school uniform and the princess dresses had to be left at home she quickly got over the idea of wanting to go to school LOL.

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