Homeschooling and Modern Ideals

Since the beginning of recorded history, the idea of educating children has been firmly in place. Only in the past two hundred years or so the idea of sending a child to one person with many other children has become commonplace. In the past forty years the regulation of the materials students learn has come to the forefront. this idea that one person who has a certificate to say that they went through special training has overtaken the idea that mothers were the best teacher for their young children. this may have come with the migration of families from the Midwest to the west coast and the inability for the mothers to teach their children while traveling the long distance to the coast. this could also have come about when Horace Mann started the first school in Ohio. This change in ideals has often led to the ridicule of the children who are still being taught at home. The children in traditional schools call these children names and tease them about not being like everyone else. Do you think that the change from homeschooling to traditional schooling has led to the chastisement of children who are different? How would you deal with a child who was ridiculing another for the way they were home schooled and brought up different? Would you ever consider placing you child into mainstream schools after homeschooling them in earlier years?
~Emilie

Homeschooling and Social Behavior

From the time I was old enough to go to school, I thought that every child in our neighborhood was going to be in my school. I soon found out that many of the children on our block were taught by either one parent or another at home. This confused me because, at the time, I did not understand what homeschooling was. My sister explained it to me once and referred to the kids as socially awkward, she was a few years older than I was, but I still did not understand. When I got to Northern and took the EPFE 201 class I learned the differences between the use of homeschooling and the social interactions of the children being home schooled. Many of the students on my class had someone they knew that was home schooled and often would describe them like my sister did when I was little, socially awkward. I thought that this was presumptuous to classify all home schooled kids this way since I knew a few people in the Music Building who were not socially awkward and were home schooled. Since that class I have met more people who were home schooled and have normal social networking skills. This idea that to be "normal" you must be sent through a traditional school system has often irritated me and caused many of my friends to become irritated as well. How do you feel about homeschooling children? Would you ever willingly home school a child? If a child cannot adapt to the structure of a traditional school, would you home school them or send them to another school?
~Emilie

Learning again

When I started at Northern, I had moved to Illinois after having taken a year and a half after high school to figure life out. During that time I took car of my toddler nephew and marveled at the way he learned new information everyday. Now I am forced into that position as well. I am relearning things that I learned in my youth and had forgotten, things that I never knew why they were done the way they were taught. I have learned in classes why becoming a teacher is important to society as a whole. I have also learned to question what I am being told. In History 260 with Dr. Hagaman, we were told to look beneath the surface and question what historians were writing about and the period they are writing in. This advice has aided me in all the classes I have had since that first semester. Have you a had a particular teacher here at Northern who has told you to question what you are being told? Have you had any teachers who have asked you to look at everything in a different way to find the truth? When you decided to become a teacher did you ever want to be like any of the teachers you had growing up?
~Emile

Becoming a Education Major

I am trying to figure out what I can do to increase my chances of being accepted into the College of Education for the Fall of next year. I have gotten good grades since I have been at Northern only one 'C' and one 'D' but I still feel that it may be impossible to predict the outcome. My advisor has told me that with my grades I should be fine when it comes to the Spring when I need to apply but since this is the first time that I have had advising with her I don't know if I will be okay or not. What types of things are you doing to try to ensure your acceptance into the program? Is there anyway that having those two bad grades will cause them not to accept my application? I know they take the people with the top GPAs but I have talked to many people who have gotten in with slightly lower GPAs than mine is right now. If you have gotten into the program how were your grades when you were accepted?

Math, History, English Oh My!

Have you ever noticed that when teachers bring the subjects of math, history, and English students seem to shutdown a little. I do not believe that it is because they dislike these subjects more than any other, but perhaps it is the way in which these subjects are being taught. I remember in Elementary and Middle School my teachers would just teach us the facts in one set way without giving us room to discover another way to reach the same answer. Those years were often frustrating though at the time I did not fully understand why; the mixture of this is the right way attitudes from the teachers and the you can do anything attidtudes from home often confused me as a child. As I teacher I hope to provide my students with the knowledge that there are many ways to rationalize different ways of doing even the simplest math problem. I also hope that my students will learn to not only memorize the facts behind history and math, so that they may regurgitate it on a test, but that they will learn the reasons why these facts were listed in their textbooks in the first place. I learned at a young age that learning just the facts that the teachers think you should know often led to problems when I was taking a test and asked to place those facts into the context of that time. With English, my Middle School teachers would ask us to write stories about made up places and people. I found this effective because I loved to write stories and poems. In sixth grade, we were asked to write poems in several styles, like Hiku, I found this very rewarding since I strongly connected my poetry to my life. During High School, my teachers would tell me that my poetry had no focus but I knew that they did not understand the free-flowing style that I used on a daily basis. One night while watching a poetry slam I found a new style that I adapted to very easily and soon became the basis for one of my longest poems "Conformity" which asks the question "Why are people judged on apperance and not what's inside". This poem also became the reason I want to publish my own book of poetry, which would track my life from the young carefree years of Middle School and early High School to the more troubled years later in my life. How have the different styles of teaching math, history, and English effected your learning experiences from childhood on? What type of learnign works best for you, seeing the material, being able to touch the material, or hearing the material spoken? Personally I respond better to hearing the material as well as writing that information down to cement it in my memory. Did any of the ways your teachers taught English change your outlook on life and the influence that your experiences had over what you write for assignments?
~Emilie