Not Sure What to Call This - Title Contest
January 10th, 2015 at 10:35 PM ^
January 10th, 2015 at 11:00 PM ^
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January 10th, 2015 at 11:09 PM ^
January 10th, 2015 at 11:22 PM ^
I'm not trying to say I told you guys but:
http://mgoblog.com/content/anyone-else-think-forcier-family-biti-dunnooff-weird
I told you guys.
January 10th, 2015 at 11:30 PM ^
January 10th, 2015 at 11:54 PM ^
excellent academics, socialization, and family bonding. i think forcier was only homeschooled a year or two and if i understand correctly in his case it was b/c he had some serious issues which unfortunately manifested themselves pretty siginificantly toward the end of his time in ann arbor and thereafter.
January 11th, 2015 at 1:10 AM ^
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree on the "socialization" front.
January 11th, 2015 at 7:48 AM ^
1. how many children have you homeschooled, or do you even have kids?
2. if you were going to teach a bunch of kids, say, spanish, would you just throw them in a room when they have no knowledge of how to speak the language and expect them to learn it? of course not. then how or why do you think that would work for socialization?
as i said below, there are countless fine examples of kids who go to government or faith-based schools who are great kids, and that is a good thing. but no matter how wonderful the kids, talk to the parents (and maybe you're one of them) about how they had to try and correct their children when they came home from school dropping an 'f'-bomb, disrespecting them, squirrely attitudes, etc. they pick that stuff up at school. concerned parents are on constant high-alert for the 'socialization' that their kids get at school. there's a reason for that.
and then there's the stuff in middle school and high school that kids do nowadays with sex that we never even dreamed of during our wildest days in ann arbor. there's a time and a place for many of those activities, but i think we can agree it's not when the kids are 12-15.
to emphasize, there are many great kids and families who don't homeschool and i don't want to disparage them. but for the reasons cited and many more that would be tl;dr, homeschooling is a fantastic way to go if you can pull it off.
January 11th, 2015 at 8:35 AM ^
I teach in a public school...
I respect home schooling and recognize that there are multiple positive and practical ways we can teach our children...
I will only say that any 'danger' (sexual, f-bomb, whatever) you want to attribute to public schools is just as prevelant in the public and one drawback of home schooling is the socialization angle (As it were)....
but like I said there are mulitple ways to teach mulitple people.
jdon
January 11th, 2015 at 2:48 PM ^
your job comes with tremendous challenges from many fronts - admin, parents, kids, rules and regs, etc. so practicing the 'teaching' part of your profession is very difficult. and teaching 20-30 is far more difficult than teaching 2 or 5 or even 10.
i do agree also about your word, 'danger', that the kids are by necessity exposed to things. it is necessary, but the difference might be that while our children are indeed exposed to that part of life it is in small bits (for us that with sports activities), not for 20,000 of the best hours of their lives for kids sent out of the home for their education.
one last item: the single largest profession for parents of homeschoolers is past and present teachers like yourself.
January 11th, 2015 at 9:47 AM ^
They did very well in school, and often tested ahead of the curve. However, so did I.
do you honestly think homeschooling is a choice for everyone? You know that guy who you think is wrong about everything? You want him homeschooling his brood of 10?
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January 11th, 2015 at 2:25 PM ^
is for everyone, so why did you ask that?
i would say that freedom is for everyone though, so if 'that guy' wants to homeschool his children, whether he has 1 or 10, well more power to him. its on him and wife to get it right.
January 11th, 2015 at 1:11 PM ^
School dances most have been a little awkward!
January 11th, 2015 at 1:30 AM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 7:34 AM ^
of the local and national science fairs, math fairs, spelling bees, etc., and colleges are actively recruiting them. for instance stanford, JH's old school, has an 11 or 12% acceptance rate for college applications, but its something like 70% for homeschoolers. also, look at all the articles you see about how the average college freshman reads at X grade level (the article i saw this week said 7th), and that for instance the detroit school system has a 24% graduation rate. that's reality.
this is NOT to say that there aren't many wonderful, smart kids who go to government or faith-based schools, there are, but our country was founded by many great men and women who were homeschooled. think washington, jefferson, lincoln and teddy roosevelt on the face of mt. rushmore as some great examples of that.
i will spare you the stories about our own children (brag, brag, and more brag) and just say that with technology the way it is, you take a dedicated parent or two and homeschooling is great.
January 11th, 2015 at 9:44 AM ^
Hi! I went to public school... Er... I mean "government school." Came from a family of teachers, ended up being just fine with my gov'ment education. Even did the unthinkable! Got into Michigan, went to a top 10 grad program and even got a job! Wow!!
All of your stats about homeschooling success are going to be biased heavily in favor towards home schooling because you will have no samples from a large portion of the socioeconomic spectrum. In other words, your stats will be meaningless because of a sampling bias that already favors the wealthy and well educated (their parents).
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January 11th, 2015 at 2:37 PM ^
you make about the socioeconomics of homeschoolers. curious why you presume that, and also if you have ever homeschooled your children, assuming you have children. indeed, that seems to be a severe bias on your part against the poor by assuming that they have no stake in their childrens' education or would never make that choice.
my experience is that most homeschooling families are not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. in fact, since almost always they are single-earner homes they are far more modest in their standard of living than their govt/faith-based school counter-parts since those households can send both parents into the job market.
and to re-emphasize my earlier posts, plenty of wonderful kids and families don't homeschool. i went to gov't school and i am very grateful for life's blessings, its just that i think back on so many of the things i saw and/or did in my student years and know for certain i would not want my kids participating in those activities.
January 11th, 2015 at 4:54 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 6:10 PM ^
i must have missed it.
and please do share your facts and citations to authority. question to you too, do you homeschool, or have you ever?
January 11th, 2015 at 9:08 PM ^
There have been studies on these topics. Rather comprehensive ones. For example:
Data in table format: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_206.20.asp
Complete report: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010004.pdf
This one shows that homeschool children are over-index white, over-index on two-parent households, over-index on higher levels of parent education, below-index on poverty, and over-index on being in a rural location.
To answer your question, no, I do not homeschool. I have zero interest in teaching and neither does my wife.
January 12th, 2015 at 5:49 AM ^
i will study in more detail on the much slicker computer at work later today. from glancing at it though, the indexes you mention doesn't come close to explaining the 5X greater accceptance rate at stanford. and you know michiganG, you and your wife undoubtedly love your little ones so maybe, just maybe, you guys should look into this homeschooling stuff. regardless, thank you for posting this, will be interesting to study a bit, and take care.
January 12th, 2015 at 9:31 AM ^
You're right, it doesn't explain the 5X rate. But, unless the majority of homeschooled students applied to Stanford, it doesn't need to, because of selection bias. There are only a few dozen homeschooled students who apply to Stanford every year - do you think they are the average homeschooled student, or do you think there's an element of self-selection going on there? And, again, this has nothing to do with proving that homeschooling actually helped those students. It's entirely possible that they would have done even better if they had not been homeschooled - these are the logistical flaws in every single argument anyone (including all of yours) has made to suggest homeschooling causes better outcomes. (For the record, the reverse arguments are also flawed in the same ways, which functionally proves that we don't know enough and so it's a matter of personal choice.)
January 11th, 2015 at 9:55 AM ^
Why don't you use the shift key?
January 11th, 2015 at 10:50 AM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 2:44 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 4:48 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 6:30 PM ^
few months and i should look for the specific article. i did find one from usnews that says the overall acceptance rate this year at stanford is 5.1%. thus, even your stats show a homeschool acceptance rate of 5X over 'conventionally' educated kids and that is an extraordinary difference even at that. and please do share wherever you are getting your 'index' for the various indexes you mention. i'm also curious how much proof it would take for someone so antagonistic to homeschooling to think that it might be a good or great thing for many people. why the hostility? maybe tate forcier was so troubled that but for his family's intervention the last year or two of high school he never would've gotten as far as he did.
you are correct in one sense about children needing protection from 'bad' socialization. all parents think that, it just manifests itself differently from one household to another. i will say that i have handled thousands upon thousands of criminal cases in my career, probably close to ten thousand and possibly more in one capacity or another. in all those years i have never had a single homeschooled suspect/defendant. i'm sure some do at some point commit crimes too, but with such a large sample size you should expect that i would have encountered at least a few hundred. not so.
January 11th, 2015 at 9:28 PM ^
Let me try this again: there's a difference between correlation and causation. And nobody has ever proven that homeschooling is actually better... but people are very good at creating spurious relationships between the two.
Just because the acceptance rate of home schoolers to Stanford is higher, doesn't mean that home schoolers have any advantage because they were homeschooled. Another example is Asian Americans - they are over-represented in many top graduate programs. Does that mean that Asian Americans are smarter because of the color of their skin, or does it mean that there are underlying differences in their family environment/upbringing?
No hostility from me towards homeschooling - it's a great choice for many people. Just some hostility towards invented statistics that somehow prove something that's never been proven.
January 12th, 2015 at 5:44 AM ^
is a pretty huge difference. and i totally get the correlation isn't always causation argument, i was the guy who took the stats finals for my U of M buddies and hockey teammates - i get the numbers. however, at some point (and 5X greater acceptance is assumedly far beyond that point) there really is a huge, logical and necessary connection to make between the two. might not be 1 to 1, but the connection is there. thank you for a vigorous discussion.
January 12th, 2015 at 9:26 AM ^
Ugh, no, not true at all. You may want to re-read those stats materials.
The classic example is that the number of drowning deaths is highly correlated with ice cream sales. You keep making the same argument here.
January 11th, 2015 at 12:05 AM ^
January 10th, 2015 at 11:31 PM ^
I got negbombed to hell when I wrote this the summer after his freshman year, but it seems my last paragraph came to pass almost exactly as I hoped.
January 11th, 2015 at 12:53 AM ^
If you guys are going to shit on a former QB here becuase he had issues, how are we any better than RCMB?
January 11th, 2015 at 8:38 AM ^
one thing is... we will always be better than RCMB based on the fact that some percentage of this blog readership actually graduated from the greatest university in the mother fucking world!
you know what all spartans and wolverines have in common? They were both accepted to MSU.
jdon
January 11th, 2015 at 9:38 AM ^
I only applied to Michigan and nowhere else. I just kinda assumed I'd get in.
#michiganarrogance
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January 11th, 2015 at 10:13 AM ^
I'm from the east coast and attended UM for grad school--the grad program I was in is considered the #2 program of its type among American schools. Sparty was never in my radar.
January 11th, 2015 at 11:44 AM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 10:20 PM ^
I'm a big fan of the film.
January 10th, 2015 at 11:04 PM ^
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January 10th, 2015 at 11:13 PM ^
Tate Forcier?
/s
January 10th, 2015 at 10:37 PM ^
about, 'a jedi you shall never be, unless learn you to listen to me'.
January 10th, 2015 at 10:37 PM ^
5 Star Wars
January 10th, 2015 at 10:38 PM ^
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January 10th, 2015 at 10:40 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 1:23 AM ^
The Bo is strong with this one, powerful, powerful coach will he be.
January 10th, 2015 at 10:58 PM ^
January 11th, 2015 at 8:46 AM ^
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