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2017 EDUCATION MAGAZINE
LINCOLN DAILY NEWS MARCH 1, 2017 Page 31
Q: What is your working philosophy of home-
schooling versus traditional public schooling?
Alice:
Home-school is a complete integration of
learning and living within our world. Public school
places a separation between education and the rest
of your life.
Teresa:
I will first say that I don’t believe that
either approach is necessarily right for everyone.
Each family has to figure out what will work best
for them.
Home-schooling allows you to customize things
towards your needs and goals, including your
belief system. This applies at both the teacher level
and the student level. You can choose curriculum
that fits your teaching and learning styles. If
something in the curriculum doesn’t work as well
as you anticipated, you can easily change it. You
can follow your interests and passions to a greater
degree than you can in a traditional school setting.
Because you are home-schooling your own child,
you get to know your child’s thinking and learning
process very well and can provide a continuity of
education from year to year.
A traditional school setting isn’t as customizable on
an individual basis due to the sheer numbers of people
involved (students, teachers, administrators, regulating
agencies, etc.) and the size of the system. Some
customization is there, but there are a lot of external
demands at all levels of the system.
Q: Is home-schooling a challenge for you as their
teacher and does it seem to be a challenge for your
kids?
Alice:
If you are asking about the mom/
teacher aspect, no. I tell them to do the chores,
I tell them to do math. There’s no authoritative
differentiation. There are days that can be difficult
as in any career choice. On the whole, we have
fairly smooth sailing.
Teresa:
Yes, there were challenges, but there are
challenges for teachers and students in traditional
school environments as well. As such, I’m not really
sure what is at the heart of this question.
• If you mean: was it challenging handling the roles
of both parent and teacher? Yes, it took effort on
my part to make sure that school “ended” at a
certain time and I didn’t hound them about their
homework as teacher, but rather maintained a role
of “parent.”
• If you mean: was it hard to be their teacher for
all subjects every year, especially ones that I’m not
as well versed on such as chemistry? It was a mix.
Most of my curriculum was structured for me and
divided into smaller units and I was able to follow
its plan. Naturally, I read the same books and
things they did so that we were all on the same page
at the same time. When it came to a subject I didn’t
know or understand as well myself, I would do one
of the following:
o research and learn more about it before we
worked on it together,
o use it as an opportunity to learn together,
modeling that learning is a lifelong process
(and that no one ever knows “everything”), or
Continued
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