A twenty-something thirty-year-old Hawaii transplant living it up on the East Coast for the past 10 years (Boston and Stamford, CT). This blog is to document my daily adventures and things that I find cool, uncool, hilarious, awe-inspiring, and annoying. Please feel free to email me at hawaiigurlinct@gmail.com.
February 1, 2012
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"We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better. When Laurie Block Spigel, a homeschooling consultant, pulled her kids out of school in New York in the mid-1990s, “I had some of my closest friends and relatives telling me I was ruining my children’s lives.” Now, she says, “the parents that I meet aren’t afraid to talk about it. They’re doing this proudly."
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Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY Education - The Daily Beast (via apsies)
Little known fact (on the bloggy-blog): my sister was homeschooled from the 6th grade on up.
In the second grade she was diagnosed with ADHD. Now I know several people “diagnosed” with this. They got unlimited time on their SATs, had open book exams throughout high school and with their high GPAs garnered from such indulgences, they went on to some of the most prestigious colleges in the country. Nice. My sister’s path wasn’t quite as luxurious.
In my sister’s case, the elementary school felt she would be better off in a “special needs” school since their plan of keeping her in during recess to catch up on all the subjects she wasn’t learning just wasn’t cutting it. So she went to one of the only schools in Hawaii that specialized in teaching kids with severe ADHD. It didn’t help. By the 6th grade she could barely read a picture book for 5-year-olds.
So my mom did a lot of research and my parents had a lot of conversations and before I knew it - my family became “homeschoolers.”
Now although I have (for the most part) nothing but good things to say about my high school - my best field trip was to a nature conservatory to learn about plants for biology class. My sister’s best field trip was walking the path of the ride of Paul Revere when they flew to Boston to visit yours truly. Winning! Although my mom clearly didn’t know what she was teaching, as my sister never learned about the (Sarah Palin) bells.
And in the end, my sister graduated (i.e. got her GED - eat your heart out Amber)
half a semester earlier than her old class did and we now currently give each other book recommendations.
(via apsies)
