Mr. Prior...this will be my one and only response to you in response to your 
diatribe (which clearly indicates what you *don't* know about homeschooling). 
Once I do this, I will be setting my twit filter so that I will not see any 
more of your posts. I am posting this only in hopes of enlightening you as to 
what real homeschooling is about, since you seem to have some deranged ideas 
about the whole movement.
First off, my qualifications: I am a teacher by profession, with over 12 
years classroom teaching experience (K,1,2,2/3,6, and K-12 Vocal-General 
Music). My husband and I have two children, ages 10 and 9, who have been 
educated both in a Christian school (when we could afford it) and in public 
school. They are currently in 5th and 4th grade, in the public school, but I 
am seriously considering pulling them out when affordability becomes more 
apparent, and homeschooling them. Until then, I am staying right on top of 
their situation and supplementing with informal learning experiences.
When teaching, I had several very positive experiences with homeschoolers. 
Several times I had homeschoolers come into the classroom situation after a 
few years of homeschooling. I found these children to be at or ahead of their 
level - mostly ahead - and better behaved than others. I have also been with 
homeschoolers in the church and other social situations, and found the 
majority to be at or above their level in thinking skills and in behavior. I 
can only think of one not-so-positive situation, and there, the mother knew 
she wasn't succeeding and decided that school *was* the better place for her 
daughter.
The majority of people homeschooling have more than a high school education 
themselves. Being a good teacher is NOT dependent on how many degrees or 
credentials you have. Even sitting through umpteen pedagogy classes doesn't 
make a good teacher. Knowing how to break something into smaller parts so 
that others can learn it, or to explain something in several different ways, 
makes a good teacher. (I am currently working in an office in the mornings. 
One man, with a HS education under his belt, has trained me to do a lot of 
different things in the office. He has the ability to break up the job into 
small pieces and show others how to do each step. OTOH, a man with an 
engineering degree and "several education courses" hands me something and 
expects me to do it, and when I ask him to explain how to do it, he can't.) 
The hardest thing for homeschoolers to do is to know what to plan to teach 
and how to design a lesson. Well, if they can read a book and decipher its 
contents, they can do that. There are so many books out there to teach 
homeschoolers what to teach and how to teach it, that it doesn't take a bunch 
of education courses to learn to do that either.
When I think back on my own teaching days, the majority of what I learned 
about teaching came under two major categories: crowd control, and lesson 
planning. Back when I went to college in the mid-70s, there were no courses 
in classroom management. Now most major institutions offer this course. The 
course teaches the basics, but it is still up to each individual teacher to 
implement it. Some have that ability, some don't. I had to learn it during 
student teaching days, and I made a lot of errors during my first two years 
teaching. In lesson planning, most errors were made in judging how long it 
would take a class of 20-30 kids to do a given lesson. Homeschooling parents 
don't usually need to worry about crowd control, but they have a different 
challenge: handling more than one grade level at a time. Once again, there 
are plenty of books and curriculum guides available to help with this. Same 
with the lesson planning (see above). Also, it seems to me that if the US 
gives a teacher two to three years to show ability as a teacher, the 
homeschooling parent will have it all under the belt in a year (less kids to 
get to know).
--- GEcho 1.00
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