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Were you homeschooled?

Worm said:
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.
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Strictly speaking originally, I had asked stuff like the usual "why is the sky blue" (or later, "why is Z80 assembly faster than ZX-81 or ZX-Spectrum BASIC), they just gave me a bunch of manuals (I actually got the 8080 and ZX-80 pin diagrams and signal timings at age 11) and told me to <bleep> off and figured that out from there.

It got worse from there once I got to a Physics Olympiad in secondary school, at which point my mom wanted to brag about those results too to her idiot friends. Then I got BURIED ALIVE in extra homework to make her girlfriends proud of her at the next olympiad. (Seriously, if we think it's illegal for a 13 year old to take a job to pay for his dad's booze addiction, why is it ok for the same 13yo to spend even more time to fuel a 'tiger mom's' addiction to praise from other women? Honest question.)

So... "home schooled?" In the sense that any of them contributed ANYTHING to that? Quoth Bender: "ha-ha-ha... Oh wait, you were serious? Let me laugh even harder: HA-HA HA-HA HA-HA!" In the sense that I've learned everything outside school? Yeah.

If you thought that was the lowest point, HA-HA, you're so wrong. By the time I was 14 and into high school, my dad got into it too. We'd spend an EXTRA 2h a day of him pretending that he taught me physics, when, at best, I was teaching him. On top of the extra physics and maths homework my mom buried me alive in.

He STILL has no <bleep>ing clue about physics. But he wanted to brag about my achievements too. We're talking the kind of berk who currently thinks that every single anti-intellectual CT, all the way that they don't know any <bleep> about the stars and QM so relativity and QM and even basic biology must be BS, has got to be true. But he wasted my childhood to pretend that he has any right to be proud of my achievements.

And you know what hurts the most? The late realization that they had neither the expertise, nor the interest in any of that. It was just to keep me from getting in their way. I could have written, "X => Y, therefore Y => X, QED", and none of them would have been any wiser. Yeah, my younger brother figured that out. I didn't. I'm dumber.
 
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Interesting the way different people learn beyond formal education. And it's been much observed that, over the last few decades, the availability of zero cost knowledge resources has grown exponentially.

I'm interested in how this can supplement formal education, including home schooling, in a more organized and encouraged manner that brings out the best in all students.
 
Ah, screw that. In my time, we didn't have Internet. My parents actually bought university manuals and beat the crap out of me if I didn't go learn them instead of getting in their way.

(Yada, yada... 2 miles through the snow uphill both ways, and we liked it that way... ;) actually, no, who am I even kidding? I still don't like one bit the whole idea.)
 
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