My Tips and Advice: Getting Started |
| 1. Benefits and Disadvantages of Homeschooling |
Below you´ll find a brief discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of homeschooling. After reading it, you should be able to better identify whether or not homeschooling may be right for you and your family.
Benefits and Disadvantages of Homeschooling |
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| 2. Bill Gates´ 11 Rules |
In Bill Gates´ book Business @ the Speed of Thought, he lays out 11 rules that students do not learn in high school or college, but should.
He argues that our feel-good, politically correct teachings have created a generation of kids with no concept of reality who are set up for failure in the real world. I thought that you might be interested in his list:
RULE 1 - Life is not fair; get used to it.
RULE 2 - The world won´t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
RULE 3 - You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won´t be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.
RULE 4 - If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn´t have tenure.
RULE 5 - Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
RULE 6 - If you mess up, it´s not your parents´ fault, so don´t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
RULE 7 - Before you were born, your parents weren´t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents´ generation, try "delousing" the closet in your own room.
RULE 8 - Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they´ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn´t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
RULE 9 - Life is not divided into semesters. You don´t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
RULE 10 - Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
RULE 11 - Be nice to nerds. Chances are you´ll end up working for one.
Read more about Business @ the Speed of Thought. |
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| 3. How to Be Frugal |
| Frugality doesn´t come naturally to most people. Thankfully, books like Miserly Moms and The Tightwad Gazette do a great job of showing us how to save enough money to live well on one income. |
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| 4. Critical Family Members |
What should you do about family members who are critical about your decisiont to homeschool? I suggest you take the time to educate your family about homeschooling.
Most family members are critical simply because they are genuinely concerned about your children and/or are ignorant about homeschooling. So give them some statistics. Or tell them what a typical day of homeschooling is like. Or ask them to come and observe you for a day. All of these things will go a long way toward reassuring family about your homeschooling decision. |
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| 5. Book for Homeschooling Newbies |
| If you´re totally new to homeschooling and would like to learn about homeschooling in a logical and sequential order, I´d suggest the Complete Idiot´s Guide to Homeschooling. This book (or one like it) can be a big help since it takes all the fundamentals and puts them in a single place. |
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| 6. Questions & Answers with a Homeschooling Expert |
What if you could get into the mind of a mom who has been homeschooling for 10 years and find out what she knows? What if you could get all your biggest questions about homeschooling answered--by her--in just 60 minutes?
Now, you can.
Questions & Answers with a Homeschooling Expert |
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