Hey folks, I thought I’d share something that you can check out when you need a break or just a little inspiration to help you “keep going” over the weekend.
I’m thinking I may do this from time to time on Friday afternoons. If you enjoy it then cool. If not… well hey I tried.
Definitely shows there are no real age limits. Often people ask around here if they are too young or too old to do this stuff. Maybe this will help to answer the questions.
And I don’t know about you but this grandpa has completed more games than I have! And he seems to be using a more C-like programming language and perhaps a bit more “hardcore” dev environment in general to do it.
I’m definitely a bit jealous of the kid. Both that technology has progressed far enough that he was able to do this at his age and that his parents were able to afford to home school him. My problems at school were fairly similar to his. My method of coping was to learn programming too but back then resources were too limited to try to make money off of it.
I always find such stories a bit depressing because it shows me how relatively little I’ve achieved in life, considering the chances I have.
That is mind-boggling to me that you can just do that so easily. Looking back on the school education that I got, I’d trust basically 0% of parents to provide the same. And as far as I know in my country homeschooling is even illegal.
It’s legal within the United States but those being homeschooled have to be regularly assessed by an authorized examiner. These days I don’t think it’s a very smart path to take though. If you don’t like the state of public schools there are generally good private schools and they’re affordable.
Really?! Illegal? I don’t know about now but not too long ago here in the USA the fancier universities preferred home schooled kids because they received a superior education compared to public schools. Private schools I am sure are generally better as well. But even now I know the public education system here is not very good. We are generally down the list a ways compared to other countries.
I’d expect any home-schooled child to be far ahead of those in public schools. Public schools are a one size fits all solution applied to many different sizes. A portion will find the coursework “just right”, a portion will find it too rushed and not have time to fully absorb the material and a portion will find it too slow paced and boring. Home schooling allows the coursework to be delivered in a more reasonable manner slower and faster as needed.
Yes, public school likes to use the phrase “no kid left behind” but that can be reversed to “no kid can excel”. My niece is six years old and is already bored with the topics they are teaching her. They’ve mentioned a few times now that when they’re able to keep her focused she is near the top of her class.
Her mother (my sister) is in the process of enrolling her in a private school now and already she loves it.
Huh. Home schooling is common both here and back home. Its often used for kids with severe ADD stuff. Often they learn in completely different ways to what the formal system provides. Then their are plenty of parents who just don’t trust the school system. Following the primary/high school curriculum doesn’t actually require that much in terms of intelligence, pretty much any parent willing to put in the time can figure it out.
In general home schooled kids tend to do better academically, with less effort, then the formal system. In a class of just three or four students the lesson material can be covered at the pace of the students. In a class of twenty tend to hit the pace of the slower students.
On the other hand home school kids are notorious for having trouble socially. Spending time interacting with other kids and adults is a huge part of developing emotional maturity. This is combined with the overprotective/controlling parents that tend to choose homeschooling.
Like anything, there are pluses and minuses. And its worth evaluating individually for each kid.
During the brief period my sister and me were homeschooled there were group activities that were arranged by one of the other parents with a few families in an effort to have socializing in addition to the learning itself. I was always the shy type though so it didn’t have much of an impact on me.
Most of my socializing came years later through voice chat while gaming and that helped immensely.
Yeah, there are ways around it. Most good homeschoolers I know reguarly get together with other homeschoolers or even regular schools for socialization. But no matter a homeschooler can’t hit the same level of social interaction that comes from having to spend all day away from home/parents and with a group of 30 random strangers.
Its also worth noting that its not all or nothing. Plenty of kids get homeschooled for a year or two then dropped back in the system. Others alternate years.
Here in Germany we’ve got laws dictating mandatory school attendance. In typical German fashion we’ve apparently also got a few dozens of exceptions and special cases regarding this matter, but in general you can’t homeschool just because you want to, and if you don’t send your kids to school, then after a while someone comes knocking at your door to force them to go to school.
I consider the German education system “pretty bad” overall, but what little I know about the US education system makes it seem “really horrible” by comparison. I don’t know how exactly it’s currently working here (probably didn’t change too much), but I had 4 years of elementary school (“one size fits all”) where they basically try to figure out how quick a child learns and then recommend on which type of secondary school to send the kid on. And at the secondary school level it’s no longer a one size fits all solution. There is a mile wide gap between lowest and highest tier of secondary school. I went to the highest tier one and after grade 10 you can either leave and get a certificate which isn’t worth too much or you can stay 3 more years and get the kind of certificate that is a prerequisite to go to university (which I did). Along the way I could choose between certain subjects a few times and had to choose 2 subjects to take advanced courses in (I chose math and english, pretty sure they changed that aspect since I went to school). So apart from the general education topics like history, art, music, religion, politics, math, physics, chemistry, sports, etc. and languages (english and french in my case), I also learned about vector math, integrals, basics of building electronic circuits, programming in Logo, Delphi and some (I believe very simplified version and application of) assembler.
So, even if you have parents that both are teachers and each teaches 2 different subjects (as was typical for teachers, afaik even mandatory) between the two they still never would be able to cover that many different topics adequately. I don’t see how it would be even possible for parents to deliver that level of education to their kids at home.
One reason why our system still is pretty bad, is that the gap between the highest tier and lowest tier school is enormous. If you end up in the low tier school type (for whatever reason) your chances for success in life plummet, and socially the environment is an absolute nightmare.
Edit: for those highly intelligent kids that are still bored in the highest tier secondary school, they are allowed to skip a whole year. I don’t know the exact requirements but I personally know 2 who did that, so it’s not too rare. Also if you can’t keep up, you have to repeat a year.
I feel like the idea of homeschooling making someone anti-social is one of those cart before the horse situations.
I feel like if a kid wants to be homeschooled, part of that reason is they have no social ties to the school anyway, because they’d probably put up with the crappy curriculum if they had some friends to talk to at lunch or whatever.
I have had a few friends who were homeschooled at one point or another, and the ones who I know are generally more social people just went back to school after a year or two, while the one who was less of a social butterfly did better at home and ended up getting his…well, whatever they call the homeschooling equivilant of a diploma… about 2 years earlier than he would have in regular public school.
Thats just one of those ideas that to me, whenever I hear it, I always think it makes no sense
Martin what you are describing is not that much different from the USA, at least to me.
There are great public schools where you will get top notch education(mine was pretty good and I took Pascal and Logo in school), and there are “lower tier” ones with inadequate funding that teach the basics needed to get kids out and may have high levels of gang violence and other nastiness. The difference maybe is that it is location based(generally you need to live in same district as the good schools).
It is why houses in good school districts cost a lot more and parents will often make that a big factor in their home buying process. Anyone who says all public schools in the US are bad is not really being fair. All that being said my kid is in private school, and probably will be for awhile, ha.
To me, I feel like the idea of public school in America has less to do with teaching, and more to do with it being government funded babysitting, so that the economy can work. It just tries to teach really basic stuff on the side in the most general way possible as to not offend anyone or cause them to think too hard.
Of course, I had a pretty garbage high school experience, so I might be biased. The way they treated people with learning disabilities in my school was to just lump them in with the pot heads and car thieves who were too bad for regular classes. I think I knew I was in the wrong place when everyone went around and introduced themselves and I was the only one in the class besides the teachers who had never commited a felony.
Yeah pretty much. Except in one high school the kids will have a good chance to go to an ivy league college like Harvard or MIT and in another they’ll be flipping burgers. It’s definitely not a fair system and it favors those who can afford the good schools.
Of course kids can overcome these obstacles and make a good life, but the overall numbers don’t lie when you’re researching school districts.
I should qualify, the paper is not quite the same. You get to choose classes like you were describing and take different classes, including advanced placement classes. These classes are accepted for credit at colleges usually and have some standards around them to verify you actually learned the material(placement tests after the class). Really though our high school(17-18 yo) is all about preparing you for college and some do it well and some not at all.
In NZ/Australia we have the same laws. However a parent can register themselves as a teacher for their own kids. You still have to submit the assessments. And kids still have to sit the national exams. If you aren’t meeting education standards for your kids then you will get the knock on the door and be told to send your kids to a formal school.
This is odd to me. In NZ (and Australia to a lesser extent) all high schools are supposed to be functionally equivalent. The government even pours significantly more funding into schools in lower socio economic neighborhoods, to balance out the funds raised by parents in wealthy schools.
Now functionally equivalent doesn’t mean outcomes are equivalent. A wealthy upper class school gets much better average results on the national exams then a poor one. Factors like the parents education level, access to computers in home, drugs and alcoholism all come into play. There are a ton of challenges that come with low incomes that simply funding schools better does not fix. But we are working on it.
