Homeschooling – Can You Really Do This?
As you know, school house teachers prepare for their career path through many hours of course work, methodology classes, and student teaching before they begin teaching school. So how in the world could a parent without such training and preparations expect to be able to successfully home school their children?
As someone who has accomplished both, I can tell you that home schooling is quite a different job than classroom teaching. For instance, a classroom teacher is tasked with the rather prodigious challenge of conveying specific skills to a large group of kids with many different learning abilities and learning styles and certainly they come from different backgrounds. I can tell you, as a teacher, the temperament toward learning in which the child is exposed to at home is a huge influencing factor when it comes to the child’s performance at school. Whether a child comes from a home environment that embraces and nurtures learning or not makes teaching a large group of students an even more challenging task. Then there are those discipline issues that inevitably come. When this occurs, the schoolteacher is bound to follow rules, regulations, and policies. And may or may not have the support of the parents in correcting the behavior.
Disciplinary action is a whole different arena when you are a homeschooling parent. This is a natural duty for you as a parent and as such you can incorporate the rules and policies that not only work best for your homeschool but for your family as well.
As a homeschooling parent, you are in control of the home environment of student(s)! And homeschoolers certainly don’t have to teach, motivate, and reach out to an entire room full of children at one time. We only have to motivate and manage one (or several) children, and even then (if you’re creative with your scheduling and planning) it doesn’t have to be all at the same time. As parents, homeschoolers are driven by the highest of motivators