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recommend a science curriculum?
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Question:
recommend a science curriculum?
Answer: I doubt it. Mark is so very pathological that,
sure, I would yank my children out of any school
he taught in immediately, but, I'd expect that
to be a one-in-a-million possibility to run
into a teacher or principal so very unbalanced.
And the reality is, Mark isn't teaching and isn't
a principal anywhere. He is "retired", to put it
kindly.
It is interesting to consider reasons people
give for their homeschooling in this context.
This website is Christian and obviously many
here have chosen homeschooling so as to integrate
religious belief and instruction into their
children's school curriculum. My wife and
I homeschool out of purely secular reasons---we
simply think we can do a better job teaching our
kids calculus and history, and so forth, than any
public school system, and we thought that and
determined to homeschool long before our oldest
reached the age of kindergarten. But, demographically,
among homeschooling families, we seem to be an unusual
case. We are part of a large mostly secular homeschooling
circle in Indianapolis, and if you talk to people in
that group about their reasons for having chosen
homeschooling, the story is almost invariable: Their
kid or kids went to school for a year or two and did
well. Then, they encountered "the teacher from hell", and
their kid was suddenly doing poorly, hated school, and
the teacher was doing nothing positive to ameliorate the
situation, or even recommending getting the kid on
Ritalin or somesuch (i.e. effectively prescribing medicine
without a license), and the mother, often over the
objections of the father, yanked the kid or
kids out of the school. So, I guess, insofar as
Mark typifies "the teacher from hell", yeah, maybe he
is *the reason* many homeschoolers have chosen to
homeschool. It's just that I think he is so extremely
pathological that I doubt many people have run into
an actual working teacher as bad as he is.
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