My best friend and i have been home schooled for a week now. I have done homeschooling twice before both times on the small island in South Korea. I missed being with people and the privileges and funny times of being at school in the classroom. I also missed having a teacher that could explain things to me. Yet, now I finally realize the advantages of being homeschooled, especially since i am in Grade 8 and I really have to start getting serious about my school.
When my family and I came back to South Africa from South Korea in 2010 i switched from being homeschooled to going to a government school. I was going to grade 7 at the time and was joining up with some of my old school mates from grade 2. My best friend had been going there pretty much her whole life and was in the grade below me so i was very excited to start and get back into the system. After about 4 weeks i found out how horribly wrong about the whole school thing. Teachers should get chosen for their love of teaching and children, not just because they are strict and want the money. People who failed their matric maths or english certainly shouldn't be teaching math to grade 7 pupils. I also found that in a class of 32 school kids, you have some who want to learn and become professional doctors and who really take learning seriously and some who just faff around and disrupt the lesson while others join in to impress their friends. Also, some kids are not as great in maths as some or in science or english, so those you are behind keep everyone else from learning and showing their true potential. So you have a teacher who is trying to explain how to calculate quadratic equations to a group of 32 teenagers who have no interest at all in the subject, then someone has to put there hand up and ask a question of how everybody's weekend was. This sentence is one of those that can completely destroy 2 hours time without anybody noticing it. This question popped up a lot in my class and kids are always eager to answer it so long as it gets them away from how to square a number. This wouldn't be so bad if one kids joined in but pretty soon you have the whole class shouting how they walked their dog or fed a horse and before ya know it the hour for maths has disappeared and you are stuck with a bunch of homework that was meant to be done in class. That's another thing I don't get. Homework. You spend 6-7 hours at school only to come home with another 2 hours of work that was actually supposed to be done at school. The teacher gets a pile of worksheets at the beginning of the day that she is meant to give out for homework at the end of each day, but when the lesson is running the ' what did you do on the weekend' question pops up and none of the required work gets done so that work plus the already assigned homework is given to kids to do at home. Then you have the problem of the homework not being the stuff you learnt in class. At school it's 2+2, at home its 2+2+4 and then in exams it's ' a man has 3 cups for water, he uses one himself then gives one away to his friend. How many cups must the man have before he has a lollipop.' The teachers only explain the easy stuff at school and give the hard work for homework so they don't have to explain it, the parents do.
There are many things that are wrong about school and that is why I am so glad to be homeschooled. I can focus on subjects that I am really interested in and can finish all the work that needs to be done quicker than at school, plus I do not get homework!
