Public School Teachers Homeschoolers Love

The podcast discusses how public school teachers can provide valuable insights and ideas for homeschooling parents. While some may feel the need to distance themselves from the public school system, it is important to recognize that both teachers and homeschooling parents share the goal of effectively teaching children. Public school teachers have experience and wisdom to offer in terms of teaching methods and communication techniques. However, it is also important to discern what is relevant and applicable to homeschooling, as some aspects of public school teaching may not be applicable in a homeschooling environment. The website homeschoolbell.com offers articles with valuable takeaways from public school teachers for homeschooling parents. Welcome to the Homeschool Girl Podcast. The title of today's podcast is Public School Teachers that Homeschoolers Love. As a general rule, homeschooling parents want to do the stellar job teaching their own children at home, so they're spending tons of time scrolling for ideas. Sometimes that can be inspiring, but it can also be intimidating simultaneously because there's an endless stream of content that is provided by these classroom teachers who are still in the public school classroom or the private school classroom. They're in a traditional environment, and they're publishing lots of ideas. Typically, teachers just have a natural inclination to share what they know because they love to instruct people, they love to learn constantly, they're proverbial lifelong learners, and also when they learn something, they want to share it either with younger students who are in the classroom or with someone they're mentoring or with the general public. It's just like a character trait of teachers. So on the whole, they are very creative and industrious, visionary people in the workplace, and they're very enthusiastic about sharing their experiences. So if you go to Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, X, TikTok, all of these social media platforms are rife with teacher's posts. Behind the scenes glimpses into their typical school day, they have optimistic vlogs, they cheer each other on, they have reflective sad vlogs sometimes where they're talking about things that have failed, community building podcasts, they have live streams, touching stories, all kinds of things you can find from professionals in the education field when you start to scroll and try to look for ideas for your home school. So something I want to just talk about out loud a little bit is that public school teachers are not the enemy of homeschooling parents, and sometimes it can feel that way because when you leave the public school system, if your kids are originally enrolled in public school and then you make the decision to leave and to homeschool, it often feels like you have to turn your back 100% completely on that system in order to be successful in homeschool. You have to purposely be extremely committed, and people who are brand new at homeschooling who've just started really want nothing to do with the public school system at first because they may be a little insecure about this decision that they've made. They may feel a little intimidated. They don't want a barrage of questions about what their plan is, how they intend to teach their children at home, and how that's going to be better than what they had in the public schools. So at first, the tendency is to just ignore and disregard everything that a public school teacher would have to say or advice that they might give for what you should do at home. I remember when I left the school system and I was a public school teacher for 12 years before I left and brought my kids home, and the chemistry teacher in the school where I was teaching asked me how I thought I was going to be capable of teaching my kids chemistry. You know, kind of like the audacity of you taking your kids home and thinking that you can do a decent job. And she reminded me that she had a master's degree in chemistry and that basically there was no way I could compare with what she was doing. Now my children at the time were two and three and a half, so I was not going to come home and immediately start teaching chemistry. But she definitely planted a seed of doubt in my mind because if I was committed to this for the long haul, my kids would eventually have to take chemistry. And she was 100% right. I have no idea how to teach chemistry. That would be like child abuse to say that I was homeschooling my kids in this subject that I have no exposure to. My background is in the liberal arts and math and science is not my strong point. So when she asked me that question, you know, it was a legitimate question. And I knew that I wanted to homeschool, so I left anyway. And I did not want to hear from any of my public school teacher friends for several years. I didn't want them to ask me questions about what I was doing. I didn't want to see what they were publishing or what they were doing. I just needed to get completely away from it. So I understand that. But eventually you realize as a homeschooling parent that we're kind of all in the same game. The public school teachers are trying to take a concept that they know very well and communicate it to a group of people who have no idea about that concept. And they have to think of the very best and most effective way to do that. And then they have to assess what they've done to see if it worked, to see if the student actually comprehended and has now acquired that knowledge for themselves. Well, that's exactly what a homeschooling parent is doing. A homeschooling parent has concepts, lessons, knowledge that they need to communicate to their child. They want to do it well. And then they need some way to measure whether or not it worked and whether or not what they're doing is effective. So you're both doing the same thing. And those public school teachers actually have a lot of wisdom to offer in ways to teach children, in ways to communicate things, in the order that you need to go in when you are introducing new concepts. They have all kinds of background, experience, knowledge, and wisdom that we as homeschooling parents can really benefit from. So we can't look at those public school teachers like they are the enemy. Like we're on opposing teams and doing completely opposite things. We also have to approach it with wisdom and discernment, though, because a lot of the things that the public school teacher is concerned about are completely irrelevant to homeschooling because they have to do with crowd control. They have to do with taking a concept and teaching it in a different way to meet the 20 different learning styles that are represented in a classroom. They have to think about things like assessing in the most efficient, the fastest, the most non-brain-taxing way possible because they have so many people to assess. It's a completely different approach, whereas the homeschooling parent is, of course, individualized. That's the whole point of homeschooling. So a lot of the things the public school teacher is going to publish and talk about are irrelevant. I completely agree with that. But at the same time, they also publish things that are true and good and helpful. So how do you comb through all of the things that the teachers are offering? How do you determine what's relevant to you, what's worth your time to read and study and look into, and what you should just leave behind? There's a quote that I like by Francis Bacon that says, some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. So some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read but not curiously, and some few are to be read wholly with diligence and attention. I really like that quote because I apply it to homeschooling as far as looking back into a traditional school setting and determining what you can learn, what you can glean from those people. These are real people who are publishing these things. It's not a system that you walked away from, but it's a group of individuals that you walked away from. So what are they offering that we should chew and digest, actually take really seriously and apply it in our own homes? And what things are they offering that we can consider but not really for very long? And what things should we just completely disregard because they're obviously irrelevant to us? The articles on my website that are called takeaways are focused on these things that are good, things that we should not ignore, but we should take it from them. So if you're interested in that topic, please go to homeschoolbell.com and I will see you there.