I gotta say...

[RayJr]

We are homeschooling and have been for about 3 weeks, I have to say the public schools teach nothing my son in the fith grade doesn't know his times tables, when they come home with hundreds all the time and 90's you don't question how there doing, until u find out they were doing multiplication and division with A CHEATSHEAT. aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. major headache pray for my wife's patients. the kids r tring and actually doing well but they were greatly miss lead by the public school and it kills me that I left them in there this long.

[Lee-Anne]

This doesn't surprise me at all. Friends of ours have five children. They were paying private school fees in a Christian school. Their 8 year old could not read when they brought him home. He was simply memorising and guessing the words. Their 13 year old son is 4 years behind in his work. Their 11 year old son 2 years. All the time they were been told their children were doing fine!!!!!!!!!!!!
They have been homeschooling for a year and half now and the children have shown marked improvement. Their 8 year old can read now and the others are progressing towards their proper grade levels.
The Australian educational system is in serious need of over hauling.
Our children have been doing ACE for 7 years ( the last 2 months we have been homeschooling). They actually learn; and know their work! I did two years of English at university and my 13 and half year old's formal English is of a far higher standard then mine! :ooops

[Anon]

My kids are in Christian school but their reading abilities, which are "average" according to ABeka standards, are totally sky high compared to their public school peers. My stepmom teaches public school and was amazed at my oldest son's reading abilities, and he reads better than the older kids in Sunday School who go to public school. However in his own school, he simply gets average grades for reading. Which is fine...my point is that the public school is NOT doing their job.

And being a math teacher myself, the way they are dumbing down math with cheat sheets and calculators totally makes me mad! You can't raise another generation of doctors and business owners like that! :thumbdown

[pneu-engine]

I see this at the college level as well.

A colleague called me the other day and asked if I would help him with his course on Statics. It's a college level course he is taking online. He showed me the book for which he paid $280.00. It turns out he knows how to "drive" his scientific calculator but doesn't even know the simple theories behind the mathematics of his calculations. I guess I was a bit brutal when I told him that we could probably teach a monkey to punch the right buttons but it would not know any laws of physics.

He said that he has all of his mathematics requirements finished. I asked him what he took. He mentioned Calculus with Analytic Geometry I, II, III and differential Equations. Okie dokie, I told him let's see how you do with a simple integral problem. He could not do a simple integral evaluation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. I told him, "Ok, let's pull a differential". He could not even extract a simple derivative from a second order equation!!!!!!! IYIYIYIYIYIIYIYIYIYIYI :-S :-S :-S

He was a bit upset (not at me) when I told him that if he should get through this program with high grades and not have learned as much as possible it will show quite detrimentally in his work performance when he gets a job and needs this knowledge.

[Anon]

That is REALLY scary.

When I was teaching Algebra II I was so frustrated at the multitude of kids who couldn't remember times tables or how to multiply fractions. And that's in Christian school! I can't imagine public...

[pneu-engine]

And being a math teacher myself' date=' the way they are dumbing down math with cheat sheets and calculators totally makes me mad! You can't raise another generation of doctors and business owners like that! :thumbdown[/quote']
When I tutored mathematics I disallowed all calculators, crib-notes, cheat-sheets, and anything else of that nature. Instead I taught tips, tricks and techniques for memorizing all the laws of signs, the hierarchy-order of the mathematical operators, all the theorems, axioms, etc. We made it fun and enjoyable. When that happened the students' minds opened up and absorbed the the knowledge like a sponge. :thumb

There are hundreds and even thousands of things to know, but the kids learned that since math builds on itself they could use a "link and association" technique to memorize their formulas and theorems. Memorizing is not fun, but discovering the whys and wherefores behind the theorems made it all come alive for them. Suddenly, they loved it and couldn't get enough of it. :clap:

[pneu-engine]

That is REALLY scary.

When I was teaching Algebra II I was so frustrated at the multitude of kids who couldn't remember times tables or how to multiply fractions. And that's in Christian school! I can't imagine public...

I soooooo agree. It isn't any wonder that engineers are building bridges and buildings that collapse.

[John81]

When I was in school calculaters were not allowed; today they are required!

I've read that many schools no longer teach learning the multiplication tables because "rote memorization is pointless and doesn't really teach anything" :roll

Before we took our oldest son out of school his teacher was actually trying to force him to read books TWO grade levels below his ability so the other students wouldn't feel bad!!! I literally had to raise a fuss in order to get the teacher to allow him to read books at the level he was proficient at. Even then the school basically backed her policy and the only books that would count towards his grade were the lower level books :loco

I have a niece graduating high school this year and in most all categories she doesn't even know what a well educated 5th or 6th grader should know. :sad However, she got good grades! :duh

[Danny Carlton]

We are homeschooling and have been for about 3 weeks' date=' I have to say the public schools teach nothing my son in the fith grade doesn't know his times tables, when they come home with hundreds all the time and 90's you don't question how there doing, until u find out they were doing multiplication and division with A CHEATSHEAT. aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. major headache pray for my wife's patients. the kids r tring and actually doing well but they were greatly miss lead by the public school and it kills me that I left them in there this long.[/quote']Try the math section at http://looklistenlearn.org/. These are the scripts I wrote for my kids to do in their homeschooling. They're all past this level now, so don't use it anymore, but I leave them online so others can. For some reason kids will more eagerly do math problems on a computer, even though they're doing almost the same work.

The Addition, Mulitplication2 and Multiplication32 I wrote in order to illustrate the process of addition and multiplication with numbers higher than 10. The Elementary Math section I wrote first, because I was tired of having to stop work to grade math papers (my technique has always been to have them keep working until all the problems are correct, like in the real world)

[Believe]

It is great that you figured this out in a timely manner.

Around here, the public schools cater to special needs children. Which is great, if you have special needs children. The non-special need children tend to be left out in the cold. If you have a child with above average intelligence they suffer because they are bored and end up causing problems.

[war_eagle]

My dad was an engineer and, later, a professor at Auburn University.

While I wasn't homeschooled, he and my grandmother (who was both an English and Latin teacher) greatly supplimented my education after school.

I never will forget coming home with a calculator that a teacher had given me. My dad got pretty ticked off that a teacher would give me a calculator to "cheat" with.

"But Dad", I told him, "It's a graphing calculator. I need it for algebra and stuff."

He wasn't buying it. He told me to take it back the next morning.

He insisted that I learn to do math by hand before I would be allowed to use a calculator. Of course, the day that I would finally get to use one never came because my dad would always say "You don't need a calculator for that. Here, let me show you how to do it."

Toward the end of the year, just before finals, I had a test in that math class. Although I only earned a B, my teacher was so impressed that I could get a "B" without a calculator, while most of the kids with calculators were failing or got Ds, he bumped my grade up to an "A".

To this day, two graduate degrees later, I don't have a clue how to use a calculator because I've never needed one. Believe me, that's not a testimony to my brilliance, but to the teaching skills of my dad and his determination that I learn to do it right.

[war_eagle]

It is great that you figured this out in a timely manner.

Around here, the public schools cater to special needs children. Which is great, if you have special needs children. The non-special need children tend to be left out in the cold. If you have a child with above average intelligence they suffer because they are bored and end up causing problems.

That's exactly what happened to me. I don't know if I was "above average" in intelligence, but I was educated at home far better than I was at school, so I was always way ahead of my classmates.

The school refused to take that into account and I ended up getting into so much trouble and just blowing off all my classes (after all, my reasoning was "Why should I sit through this boring stuff that I've already mastered") that I ended up in special ed.

When I was fourteen, my mother finally got so mad at the school district that we sat down to talk and she and my dad gave me a choice: I could either quit school, enroll in night school and have my high school diploma by the time I was fifteen, or go to a private school.

Obviously, as a fourteen year old, the idea of quitting school appealed to me, but I loved baseball and football and had been looking forward to highschool to have a chance to play.

We compromised. The laws at that time were written in such an ambiguous way that you could basically go to any government school you wanted to. You didn't even have to live in that district.

So, we went to another government high school and my mother struck up a conversation with a lady who just happened to be the head of the Child Study Team there. When she heard why I came to this school, she called me in and gave me a battery of tests.

The result was that they decided that I was about two years ahead, academically, so they bumped me up to tenth grade.

After that, I was a model student and loved school.

[ptwild]

I ended up in special ed.

Isn't this a prerequisite for getting into Auburn? :cool

Just joking with you. It's nice to have a fellow SEC grad on here. I went to undergrad at UGA.

[war_eagle]

delete