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Were you homeschooled?

Carlotta

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I'm not asking about your kids, but about adults here who were schooled at home. What was it like, and how are things going now?
 
Not by a strict definition (i.e. did not attend schools).

But... My parents made sure that I had basic reading, writing and arithmetic under my belt before I attended school.

(NB. Really basic. i.e. no particularly complex words, but understood the alphabet and was making the first attempts at writing. Similarly really basic info about numbers.)
 
I was definitely NOT homeschooled -- 12 years public school, four of state college.
However, I lived in a home that made sure I did the best I possibly could in school. I had educational toys, was encouraged to read, and got tutors a couple of times when I struggled with math. Best of both worlds, I think.
 
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It was extremely uncommon when I was growing up; I don't think I know anybody in my age group who didn't go to either a public or private school.
 
Mum was a teacher and I could read and write before I started school, but no, I wasn't "homeschooled".
 
Orphia Nay said:
Mum was a teacher and I could read and write before I started school, but no, I wasn't "homeschooled".
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Neither of my parents were teachers but I could read and write before primary started. My eldest niece likewise (I don't know about the others).
 
I've met one person in my life that I known to have been homeschooled for non-religious reasons and they were a perfectly sociable person that seemed to be quite talented student.

All the rest I've met were usually homeschooled for less good reasons, mostly to seclude them away from the secular world. Not surprising that the quality of education coming from religious whack-a-doos was generally quite poor.
 
I've known quite a few homeschooled folks, mostly for religious reasons, most I've know were at least as well educated as the typical public school kids I've known.

I had a friend in grades school who's parents homeschooled him from around the 3rd to 10th grade. Funny thing is, his dad was a public school teacher.
 
ahhell said:
I've known quite a few homeschooled folks, mostly for religious reasons, most I've know were at least as well educated as the typical public school kids I've known.

I had a friend in grades school who's parents homeschooled him from around the 3rd to 10th grade. Funny thing is, his dad was a public school teacher.
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That seems like damning with faint praise to me. A student getting one on one attention, assuming they don't have any complicating factors, should be outperforming any public school where large group instruction is the norm. It's a huge manpower demand to homeschool children vs sending them to public schools, you'd hope there was some benefit to justify it.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
I've met one person in my life that I known to have been homeschooled for non-religious reasons and they were a perfectly sociable person that seemed to be quite talented student.

All the rest I've met were usually homeschooled for less good reasons, mostly to seclude them away from the secular world. Not surprising that the quality of education coming from religious whack-a-doos was generally quite poor.
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Yes, it always seemed (up until Covid) that people who were homeschooled were being homeschooled for religious reasons.
 
I wasn't homeschooled but the math and science I learned from the 7th grade on had nothing to do with school classroom learning. These subjects just fascinated me and I'd check out books of interest from the local public library or Boston's museum of science library (which had a lending period of 4 weeks unlike the 2 weeks the local library had).

In my school classrooms I just daydreamed or did homework for the non science/math classes except when they had tests.

Had the internet existed back then I would have been in hog heaven.
 
For the most part. I mean, I still had to endure school, if nothing else, as a self-storage facility where my parents could dump me for half a day. Although I could read and write since 3, and could do integrals and differentials about two years ahead of the school schedule (respectively), and I was already into Berkely University physics manuals in the 10'th grade, etc.

So yeah, I already knew everything from home, but technically I still had to go to school anyway :p

Sucked to be me :p
 
Strictly speaking, no I was not homeschooled. But both my dad and stepmother were teachers, and specifically my dad was my teacher (mathematics) so inevitably some stuff blurred across the divide between home and school. In particular I was an avid reader of my dad's books on manthematics and popular science.

Not sure it made any significant difference other that made my mathematics studies a bit easier becasue I was familiar with a lot of the concepts through my own independent study rather than in the classroom, and it gave me a healthy respect for the teaching profession :)
 
HansMustermann said:
So yeah, I already knew everything from home, but technically I still had to go to school anyway :p

Sucked to be me :p
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Yeah. In my case it had one big downside. I developed non-existent study habits so, in college, when I opened my last trimester, 2nd year finals I had almost no idea what to do. Everything was quantum mechanics including the math course. I had never found it interesting and hadn't previously studied it at all. While the finals were all take home and open book, they were limited to 3 hours. No way to learn QM and related stuff in the 3 hours. Flunked eveything except a grad level EE course I went to the class and dealy loved. Got an A in it. Had to repeat the semester.

DIY approach to learning had it's downside.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
That seems like damning with faint praise to me. A student getting one on one attention, assuming they don't have any complicating factors, should be outperforming any public school where large group instruction is the norm. It's a huge manpower demand to homeschool children vs sending them to public schools, you'd hope there was some benefit to justify it.
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If you went to my public school, you'd realize that's just praise.
 
Not home schooled here - not really an option in the 1950's, but I was taught to read at home, after the complete and utter failure of the Detroit public school in their first grade attempt at whole word reading. At the Christmas break they were disappointed that I could not read yet. I knew the alphabet but flummoxed by the pictographic approach to words. By the end of the Christmas break they were using the front page of the New York Times as a primer.

At other times I got some sort of random home schooling in other things. My older sister, though a pain in many ways, had a knack for teaching, and in second grade (now in Massachusetts, thankfully) she decided I ought to get ahead on arithmetic (which had been utterly absent in first grade, because the entire day was consumed by mindless marching from room to room, stupid movies about the atomic bomb threat, and mostly the futile attempt to teach anyone to read). So she taught me stuff like carrying and borrowing, and fractions, and for a brief time I was ahead of the curve in arithmetic. Unfortunately, I did not take to math in general, but it was a nice start.
 
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