Since I'm going to be busy getting ready for the school week today, and we are off with Daddy today, I'll just leave you with a couple of articles:
Please stop in and read this article about homeschooling children with ADD. I am reading the most AMAZING book right now: "The Mislabeled Child", and plan to do a review on it soon. In case you needed some encouragement today, here's a snip from the article that I couldn't help but post here:
Successful homeschoolers come in all flavors. The United States and Great Britain have a long history of educating children at home. The practice has helped produce outstanding adults in many fields. Among United States presidents, George Washington, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Woodrow Wilson, William Henry Harrison, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt benefited from homeschooling. Other well-known statesmen with similar schooling were William Penn, Winston Churchill, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin. Many great military leaders received some homeschooling, among them Robert E. Lee, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur. Many successful composers, writers, and artists were given homeschooling: Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Irving Berlin, Hans Christian Andersen, Pearl Buck, Noel Coward, Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Helen Keller, George Bernard Shaw, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Claude Monet, and Andrew Wyeth. Great innovators and inventors have benefited from homeschooling: Alexander Graham Bell, George Washington Carver, Pierre Curie, Leonardo daVinci, Thomas Edison, Cyrus McCormick, Andrew Carnegie, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Albert Einstein, and Charlie Chaplin. Two particularly well-known women who received homeschooling were Florence Nightingale and Eleanor Roosevelt. The explorers Lewis and Clark were both homeschooled."Hey", my daughter said, "THAT's our UNIT!" (We're studying about Pioneers, Indians, Frontiersmen and the American West right now). Then she said to me... "But I thought Lewis met Clark at a school." Lewis actually met Clark in the military, where I'm sure a measure of training and educating must have taken place.
ABC also did a recent article about colleges coveting homeschoolers. Read the story below (as sent to me by my friend Amanda):
From ABC 7 News:
Colleges Coveting Home-Schooled Students
Location: COLUMBIA, Mo.
Posted: September 30, 2006 3:38 AM EST
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) - Bombarded by choices at a college job fair, Sara Kianmehr quickly found her match: Columbia College, a small, private school that didn't mind that her transcripts came from her parents. The college "was the only institution that didn't have a puzzled look and say, 'Home school,' and ask me a million questions," the 19-year-old junior said. "There was a big appeal."
With colleges and universities aggressively competing for the best students, a growing number of institutions are actively courting homebound high achievers like Kianmehr, who took community college courses her senior year of high school and hopes to eventually study filmmaking at New York University or another top graduate school.
The courtship can be as subtle as admissions office Web sites geared to home-schooled applicants or, in the case of Columbia College, as direct as purchasing mailing lists and holding special recruiting sessions.
"After years of skepticism, even mistrust, many college officials now realize it's in their best interest to seek out home-schoolers", said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
"There was a tendency to kind of dismiss home schooling as inherently less rigorous," he said. "The attitude of the admissions profession could have at best been described as skeptical."
"Home-schooled students - whose numbers in this country range from an estimated 1.1 million to as high as 2 million - often come to college equipped with the skills necessary to succeed in higher education", said Regina Morin, admissions director of Columbia College.
Such assets include intellectual curiosity, independent study habits and critical thinking skills, she said.
"It's one of the fastest-growing college pools in the nation," she said. "And they tend to be some of the best prepared."
The number of home-schooled graduates enrolled at Columbia College is small - about a dozen out of a full-time undergraduate population that hovers near 1,000. But they count among their supporters an influential advocate.
Terry Smith, a political science professor and the school's dean of academic affairs, home-schooled three of his four children in the 1970s and '80s. Each of those children went on to graduate from college, with two earning master's degrees.
"All of my professional work has been influenced by this family schooling experience," he said. "We're all teachers and learners. They're just the apprentices, and we're the master learners."
The school's admissions standards for home-schooled students are identical to those for traditional graduates - minus the formal transcript requirement. Some colleges and universities, though, continue to require home-schoolers to earn a GED high-school equivalency diploma or take subject-specific SAT tests along with the standard requirements.
At Stanford, sympathetic admissions officers have helped make the university a beacon for high-achieving home-schoolers. The support can be seen on the Stanford admissions office's Web site.
"The central issue for us is the manner in which you have gone about the learning process, not how many hurdles you have jumped," the office advises home-schooled students. "We look for a clear sense of intellectual growth and a quest for knowledge in all of our applicants."
Jon Reider, a former senior associate admissions director at Stanford, said the school's pursuit of home-schoolers fits its academic and social mission.
He also acknowledged that Stanford and other schools now realize that home-school students are a prominent enough population that can only be ignored at a university's own peril.
"Part of it is driven by demographics," said Reider, now a guidance counselor at a private high school in San Francisco. "There's a surplus of college spaces" and attracting good students to them is important everywhere.
Magdalene Pride, a first-year Columbia College student, was a beneficiary of the school's aggressive recruitment of home-schoolers.
After earning more than 50 credit hours through a combination of community college classes near her suburban St. Louis home and online Advanced Placement course, Price was awarded a four-year scholarship to Columbia College that covers the school's $12,414 annual tuition.
Among those who helped sell her on Columbia College was Kianmehr, a student ambassador who spoke at a college fair Pride attended.
"They're so open to home-schoolers here," she said. "No one looks down on me, or treats me different. It's very accepting."
Hope those articles gave you your daily dose of homeschool encouragement. My encouragement came this week from five separate people over our holiday who told me that my children were so impressive (well behaved, kind, Christ-like, etc.) that they felt compelled to comment to me. One of these people told me they wanted to homeschool their own children as a result of being around my kids! It never hurts to get comments like that! Thanks be to God!
Well, I had better get over to Kinkos and get a copy of my Christmas letter printed and put it in PDF form. So, if you are on my regular email list, be watching your box (in case the size of the file fries your hard-drive).
Have a super week!
Buzz Words: Homeschooling, Learning, Education, Founding Fathers, Inventors, History, Homeschool, Holidays, Christmas, Letters, Teaching, America, Parenting, Home School, Life, Encouragement, Opinion, College
No comments:
Post a Comment