I remember how it was -- JR
You Don’t Need Qualifications to Homeschool Your Kids
Over the years, I’ve heard so many parents dismiss the possibility of homeschooling their children because they don’t feel “qualified.”
“I’m not a teacher.”
“I’m not good at math.”
“I wasn’t good at X in school, so I could never teach my child that subject.”
All these assumptions stem from a fallacy about what education is, and what makes an individual “qualified” to be a teacher.
The fallacy: that your ability to teach relies on your expertise on the topic you’re teaching. While that may be true for selling your teaching as a service—you wouldn’t make a living teaching a class in a topic you don’t understand—it’s not a prerequisite for effectively facilitating your child’s learning.
Whether or not you hold a teaching certificate is an irrelevant accessory to your ability to teach. To be an effective educator, all you need to be able to do is:
* Use reference resources (like books and Google)
* Find the answers to your own questions
* Foster a sense of curiosity in your children
If you can do those things, you’re qualified to be a homeschooling parent.
In most cases, basic Googling skills and the ability to explore with your child is all you need to teach your children at home.
Take this as an example: your child is sitting outside in the sun drinking a cold drink, and asks you why the outside of their cup is getting wet.
Your reaction is simultaneously intimidation (I have no idea) and interest (there might be a science lesson buried in this).
You say, “I don’t know. Let’s figure it out.”
Five minutes and some Googling later, your child has learned about condensation, the dew point, and the effects of a hot entity meeting a cold one.
Your child has the answer. They have the same outcome they would have received had they asked an expert; they now know why condensation forms on their cold glass. The only difference is that they got to see your process along the way—which is an asset, not a deficit, because they’ve learned something about finding answers to their questions, a process they will be required to repeat over and over throughout their lives.
As a parent, your ability to use your Googling skills to teach applies to entire subjects, not just one-off questions. The most common subjects I hear parents express intimidation of are math and science; subjects they often found challenging in school, and don’t feel qualified to teach to their children.
With abundant free resources on the internet (such as YouTube and Khan Academy), as long as you know how to find an answer to a question—which every adult who can Google does—you can facilitate your child’s learning on any topic, whether by finding the answers yourself or by finding resources that can do the teaching for you.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/11/15/qualified-homeschool/
*****************************************Parent Activists Warn That Fight for Education Far From Over
Parent activists, school board members, and a congressman gathered Monday in Washington to remind Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department that the fight for education is only just beginning.
“Whether it’s radical transgender policies in our schools, whether it’s putting masks on our children, which is paramount to child abuse, whether it’s forcing vaccines on our children, or whether it’s teaching radical critical race theory in our school systems, educating our teachers to teach that, the lens through which everything is taught, we reject that,” Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., said at a press conference held by the conservative and libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks.
Good warned that parents are not going to stand down or “be quieted,” calling for parents to continue fighting for their children by “standing in the gap” when the state or federal government errs.
“One of the things I’ve advocated for is cameras in the classrooms,” Good said, adding:
Parents ought to be able to look at the classroom at any time and see what’s happening in their school systems. Congress has given over $200 billion in funding to the school systems because of the virus and the pandemic, when they only asked for $25 billion from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to safely reopen. Let’s use some of that money to have greater transparency in the classrooms.
In an Oct. 4 memo criticized by countless parents, Garland directed the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate parents who allegedly threatened violence against public school officials.
Republican Glenn Youngkin’s Nov. 2 defeat of his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, in the Virginia governor’s race has been widely attributed to parental outrage at increasingly radical school policies in that state and across the nation. Virginia Republicans also swept statewide races for lieutenant governor and attorney general and retook control of the House of Delegates in the General Assembly.
At a Youngkin rally in Loudoun County the night before the election, many parents told The Daily Signal that they support Youngkin out of a desire to retain more control over their children’s education and to avoid the pitfalls of progressive education, such as critical race theory and explicit sex and gender education.
But parent activists from Utah, Arizona, Florida, and several other states told The Daily Signal at the FreedomWorks press conference that progressive school board members are not backing down in the face of these parental rebellions—they are fighting back even harder.
“I feel like they are gearing up more,” said Angelique Contreras, a school activist in Palm Beach, Florida.
“They bring 20 police to one person to every school board meeting,” Contreras said. “We’ve had multiple people arrested just for showing up. In the interim, it’s actually the school boards that are treating parents and putting fear into the parents not to show up. … They are leading with that aggression towards the parents, and it’s been really, really bad.”
“Find your voice,” urged Pam Kirby, a former member of the Governing Board of Arizona’s Scottsdale Unified School District.
A member of that school board compiled an “online dossier” on parents that included personal photos, Social Security numbers, one parent’s divorce proceedings, and financial records, The Daily Caller reported.
“This is just one of many examples of bad behavior we are seeing from power hungry school board members across the country,” said Kirby, who also serves as first vice chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.
Kirby insisted that the majority of the nation’s school board members want to serve families, but are bullied by the teachers unions, the superintendents, and the school board associations.
“I am calling on those school board members who want to do the right thing to find your voice,” she said. “It’s time for you to tell the NSBA [National School Boards Association] and your state school board associations that you will no longer submit to their indoctrination. You do not work for the superintendents, you are not the cheerleader for the institutions. You work for the people.”
The Arizona school board member also called on parents to remind members of their school boards that they are using tax dollars for their membership dues for state associations and the National School Boards Association.
“Tell them that you will no longer allow them to fund the institutions that are eroding your parental rights,” Kirby said.
Kirby highlighted the launch last month of the Arizona Coalition of School Board Members, an organization that promises to “provide training and resources to school board members, candidates, parents, and communities across Arizona rooted in the priorities of educational freedom, parental rights, and academic excellence.”
“If you are a board member who finds that your state association and the National School Boards Association are unworthy of your continued support, don’t be intimidated,” Kirby said. “Revoke your association memberships today and stand shoulder to shoulder with your parents and your community. And focus on who is important: the kids.”
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Teacher Shortage Causing School Cancellations
In five states last week, schools had to make it a short week by canceling classes, using Veterans Day as an excuse. In truth, these cancellations occurred not because of any particular reverence for those who served in the Armed Forces but because of a lack of teachers. These unexpected days off threw parents for a loop as they scrambled to figure out childcare, giving them flashbacks to last year’s lockdowns. But parents are not the only ones who have some post-traumatic stress regarding shutdowns and quarantines. Teachers have also had a lot to cope with since the COVID regulations forced them into remote teaching. This constant cycle of survival mode has not stopped over the last year and a half, and the stain is starting to show.
Teachers have some of the highest burnout rates in the workforce, and that was before the global pandemic threw a wrench into things. There are many reasons for this. One of the biggest is that working with children and teaching them is a calling, a ministry, and a work of heart. If a teacher is in an environment where he or she is not properly supported materially, mentally, or emotionally, it makes an already challenging job unbearable. The pandemic and its constantly moving goalposts really didn’t help matters.
A lot of teachers are Type A planners. When the schedules are volatile and the rules regarding COVID keep changing, that creates a major stressor. There is only so much flexibility teachers can take, especially when their usual modus operandi is so disrupted. They cannot give their best under these conditions, particularly when online learning in rife with student cheating that undermines teaching.
Many teachers are mothers. If their child has the sniffles or some other sickness, this can keep them out of their jobs for days or even weeks due to the hyper-vigilance of the new COVID precautions. At the beginning of last school year, merely being exposed to a person infected with COVID was enough to demand two weeks worth of quarantining. This is extremely stressful on the teacher, whether it be from worrying about their own sick child, or from having to remotely plan for a substitute teacher to ensure their students don’t fall behind.
As if that weren’t enough pressure, teachers are now having to cope with differing philosophies that have slowly invaded the pedagogy. Teachers are being told to treat their students differently based on skin color and to constantly adjust the academic standards based on equity. Many teachers are speaking out against this ideology in the classroom. Some have even quit in defiance of having to teach this racist doctrine. Then there are the unisex bathrooms, LGBTQ+ books ranging from ridiculous to pornographic, and even school administrators and counselors concealing a child’s “transition.” Finally, the teachers unions are playing politics with their dues and further contributing to school closures. No wonder teachers are quitting.
This last issue has become even more important as we experience rising inflation. Teachers’ pay is, in general, not very good, especially at the elementary school level. With the government granting stimulus checks, child tax credits, and eviction moratoriums, it takes away the incentive to work. If these teachers are young mothers anyway, they are much more likely to prefer part-time work-from-home jobs than to go back to the classroom. No one goes into teaching for the fortune and fame, but when you add in all the other factors listed above, a part-time job that potentially pays just as much as a full-time teaching job is extremely appealing.
The biggest issue of all is that this labor shortage isn’t limited to teachers. Other workers such as school janitors, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers are also leaving their positions. Some for better-paying jobs, some because it simply pays better (or at least well enough) to be unemployed right now because the government supplies the paycheck. In this current dangerous economic climate, the government is torpedoing the chances at a quick recovery at every turn. This is just the latest in the butterfly effect of bad economic policy.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/84260-teacher-shortage-causing-school-cancellations-2021-11-17
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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