16 ms·

My brother and I were homeschooled, but it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid. My brother did the SAT as we

by eloff 6y ago

My brother and I were homeschooled, but it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid. My brother did the SAT as well. We had excellent scores. We both dropped out of college with near perfect GPAs. Today I'm a successful self-taught software engineer now starting a SaaS business. My brother is a famous sci fi author. He makes even more than I do. I think homeschooling let us learn whatever we wanted to learn without fear, and find our own path in life. Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places. So socially we had a lot to learn. I don't think that was a permanent disadvantage, but it was not a necessary drawback of homeschooling. I would recommend sports and other after school activities to add the social dimension into homeschooling.

saas_sam 6y ago
Fascinating. Do you think things would've turned out differently for you and your brother had you attended public school? Private? I went to a truly terrible rural public school and I see many areas where that has held me back. Success was something to be ashamed of there. Loserthink was king.
- eloff 6y ago
  It's impossible to say of course. But I think at the least we would have led more conventional lives. For myself, maybe a darker outcome. I was struggling with peer pressure and getting into trouble. The family that owned our house before lost their daughter to overdose. She went to my school. I wonder sometimes how my life could have been had things been slightly different and we hadn't changed to homeschooling (after grade 6 for me, 3 for my brother.)
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    I suspect it would depend a lot on whether you were allowed to accelerate academically, and the answer would likely have been "no" or "not much". You might take a look at the following study, and see if it rings true to the school you did experience, or to what you've heard from others you've met: "The considerable majority of [the subjects: young people with 160+ IQs in Australia] who have [skipped 2 or more grades in K-12] report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school." https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf I don't know if you're at the 160+ level, but SAT scores are something of a proxy for IQ, and the severity of the social and academic frustration due to mismatch with age-peers can be judged directly.
    - eloff 6y ago
      I am above average intelligence, but not 160 level. My hope when we started homeschooling was to complete the grades faster, but it was still school and didn't hold my interest enough for that. I ended up finishing later than normal, mostly because I got side tracked with my newfound passion for computer programming. I took two years before college to explore that, and went to college reluctantly. When I got there I soon realized I had gaps in my knowledge, but generally was ahead of the 4th year students assisting the professors. I didn't want to spend 4 years and a great deal of money pursuing just a piece of paper, and dropped out.
    - phobosanomaly 6y ago
      Community colleges can offer an alternative option, even in smaller suburban and semi-rural areas. I hated high-school, but I took classes at the local community college every night, my high school accepted the credits, and I graduated high school a year-early with transferrable college credits. My night-school experience gave me an opportunity to push my brain as far as I wanted, and it showed me what the 'real world' was like since my classmates were in their thirties, as opposed to the 'high-school world,' or whatever my eccentric parents would have cooked up.
    - bradleyjg 6y ago
      The SATs have a ceiling well below four standard deviations above the mean. I’m skeptical that any test is properly calibrated at that level—-even with oversampling it’s very difficult to do properly.
      - username90 6y ago
        Many IQ older IQ tests doesn't use 15 points per SD, so when you hear people talk about enormous IQ's like 160 it almost surely doesn't use a modern scale.
- dboreham 6y ago
  And in the past four years it has become government policy.
numakerg 6y ago
> famous sci fi author If it's the same author I found based on a cursory search from your profile, then "famous" is a bit of a stretch. > Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places I got a similar feeling reading about Chris Paolini. Homeschooled, raised in a remote place. Fed a lot of his early life experiences, particularly travel, into his novels but felt alienated from other kids.
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  > then "famous" is a bit of a stretch. That's a bit rude. I did the same cursory search and realized my friends and I are big fans. Just because you don't recognize the name doesn't mean others don't.
  - bena 6y ago
    My name is known in certain small circles, it doesn't make me famous. So just because you recognize the name, doesn't mean he's what one would classify as famous.
    - brodouevencode 6y ago
      And the opposite is true too, which is my point. Maybe OPs circle is too tight.
- eloff 6y ago
  Well he's not JK Rowling famous, but he has sold over a million books which puts him in a pretty elite club author wise. Especially in sci fi, that's a lot. I'm very proud of my brother, he started down a very difficult career path and became very successful. All self taught.
  - paperwasp42 6y ago
    Former publishing industry professional here. If he's broken the 1 million books mark, I wouldn't hesitate to call him famous. He's more successful than 99.99% of authors. Makes me very happy you celebrate his success so openly. In my time in the industry, I saw a lot of fiction authors dismissed by their family/friends who worked in non-creative industries. Thanks for being one of the awesome relatives. :)
jsnk 6y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. Were you home schooled by your mother or your father? And whoever was home schooling you, were they working either part time or full time? I am interested in homeschooling as well.
- eloff 6y ago
  My mom stayed at home and my dad worked. But really because we could read well and follow the lessons, it wasn't a large burden for mom. She had a lot of reservations when we started, but soon realized she could handle it. I don't see how it would work if both parents are working, you'd need a nanny or something in that case.
BugWatch 6y ago
Would you mind revealing your brother's nom de plume (assuming he writes under one)?
- eloff 6y ago
  I can't reveal that here because it's easy to identify me from my HN posts and thus tie his pen name to his real identity.
  - davidgay 6y ago
    If it's who the 'obvious' google search reveals, you've said too much already (and at least one the links that search gives reveals the family name directly).
    - jsmith45 6y ago
      I suspect the worry is in the other direction. Sure it is not difficult to figure out what the brother's pen name is. And if you know both his names, it is not hard to find connections between them. The part that popular authors usually want to avoid is making it easy to go from the pen name to the IRL name if you don't have some specific guess or anything. Right now I don't think going in that is particularly easy. If the grandparent however has said the name here it would almost certainly have made it easier to get from the pen name to the IRL name.
mgh2 6y ago
This might work for outliers/higher IQ/elite people in the HN community, but consider this: 1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule. 2. Not everyone is self-motivated to learn. Children, at critical developmental ages, are more prone to be led astray than "follow their passions" (at this age, really?). They will more likely be manipulated by vices if not constantly monitored. Note: Even adults struggle to find their "passion", good for the lucky few. 3. Not all parents are good teachers. Usually, responsible families understand the value proposition- they wish their children have a better future- and education is the most assured/common ticket that provides these opportunities. 4. School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style). Public schools, with all its flaws, are the best instruments to free the masses. Knowledge is democratized power to avoid the corruption that absolute power entails.
- abnry 6y ago
  There is a lot of bias towards homeschoolers so the wild success stories often get touted to counteract the prejudice. I was homeschooled but agree that it isn't for everyone, mainly because not everyone has the resources. It decidedly requires a middle class lifestyle. Also, parents need to have something of their life together beyond just financial resources. But people overestimate the competence required of a parent to teach. Probably the biggest thing I learned was learning how to learn, and in particular, doing that on my own. So reading the textbook in college was hardly a shock. If my parents didn't understand a subject, they could learn it with me, or find the resources I needed (including community college, online courses). Unschooling, however, I am not too sympathetic to. You need some structure.
  - petertodd 6y ago
    > Unschooling, however, I am not too sympathetic to. You need some structure. For most kids you probably need some structure. For some, unschooling certainly works well; for others it's another term for "school dropout". I personally was both homeschooled and unschooled, for different topics, and a high % of the smartest people I know were unschooled. I really struggled to learn to read and write, even by grade five. So my parents took me out and my mom worked with me one-on-one intensively to learn phonics, which finally fixed that problem. Meanwhile, prior to that the biggest challenge I had in learning programming on my own is that I struggled to actually read the books I had on it. I think that unschooling taught me how to learn on my own, in a way that was very beneficial later in life. Yet again, I'd say based on my experience taking relatively high-level, proof-based, math classes in university many years later, that for me the structured experience of university math worked much better than trying to learn those subjects on my own (which I had also tried!). Yet, for high school math, there hadn't been much difference (I did attend highschool). Learning isn't one-size-fits-all.
an_opabinia 6y ago
> it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid This has been touched upon elsewhere by other commenters. But to at least ask you personally, would you concede that if you were doing well on tests despite the absence of the kind of cramming / teaching-to-the-test that the average schooled student receives, you could have done any kind of education, and in many ways, there is nothing special at all about homeschooling? Or that if your structure re-enacts this teaching, but it's a lot less time than the average student, you definitely have a natural aptitude for test taking? Are tests the only way we can robustly evaluate a kid's education, until they are 18? If so, will sports matter if you're getting bad test scores? What does? Here's the crazier conclusion. That people finger parental income or cultural values as the biggest factors of education outcomes, and in reality test performance is mostly genetic. It might as well be, from a policy perspective, randomly assigned - God rolls a 100 sided dice when you're born, and if it's a 1 or a 2 all standardized tests are easy for you. If you roll the other 98 numbers, the best thing is to cram. We don't need alternatives to traditional schooling. We need a way of evaluating kids that rewards genuine learning. Kids who are learning should be scoring poorly sometimes, and that's the exact opposite of how children are evaluated, and poor scores are the exact opposite of what most parents of high achievers want. Earnest parents are really seeking true learning. On the flip side, parents who send their kids to cram school or kvetch about college admissions not being fair because colleges consider factors other than totally and utterly gameable, zero-learning standardized tests - they are the antagonists. They are ruining our education system, they make school look the way it does, they are seeking a completely worthless advantage for their children (high test scores in the absence of valuable learning via cram school) for some cynically, utterly selfish devotion to values like making money and buying expensive things. Values so primitive and debasing that human cultures around the world have refined, multi-thousand-year-old refutations of materialism - opposition to materialism (asceticism) may be the most mature philosophy of all of history, at least as dominant as family values and theism. And then, to rationalize all of this, they find the least privileged and disadvantaged families and blame them instead! All the while pretending that there's some sort of equivalence of shittiness in their situations, because of some fucking number like income, between their families and the Other. It's complete and total bullshit. Some changes to the school system can help everyone live happier lives and learn more, like different children spending longer (or shorter) times in class. But really, we have to throw out tests. Or invent a test so sophisticated that it avoids being gamed by cramming.
sigzero 6y ago
We do the same. Our homeschool community is rather large and we have sports (you name it we probably do it). We even compete with other public schools.
3131s 6y ago
I wanted this, I essentially begged for it for 12 years with no success. I didn't need any extra motivation to read or do math problems and I was way above my grade level in both, but had behavioral problems because I was so bored in school. I still ended up with very high SAT and ACT scores too, but eventually broke down toward the end of college and graduated on time but with a few bad grades. My parents would have lost their minds if I had dropped out during any of the first three years when I also had an A-average GPA. The public schools I went to all had a gifted program in various forms, which most years was just one hour a week and taught topics that should have been available to every student in the school. Amazingly, the teacher showed us the structure of a URL in around 1994 when I was in first grade.
GHwirrr4 6y ago
Do you mind naming the books your brother has written?

by eloff 6y ago

saas_sam 6y ago

Fascinating. Do you think things would've turned out differently for you and your brother had you attended public school? Private? I went to a truly terrible rural public school and I see many areas where that has held me back. Success was something to be ashamed of there. Loserthink was king.

eloff 6y ago
It's impossible to say of course. But I think at the least we would have led more conventional lives. For myself, maybe a darker outcome. I was struggling with peer pressure and getting into trouble. The family that owned our house before lost their daughter to overdose. She went to my school. I wonder sometimes how my life could have been had things been slightly different and we hadn't changed to homeschooling (after grade 6 for me, 3 for my brother.)
- waterhouse 6y ago
  I suspect it would depend a lot on whether you were allowed to accelerate academically, and the answer would likely have been "no" or "not much". You might take a look at the following study, and see if it rings true to the school you did experience, or to what you've heard from others you've met: "The considerable majority of [the subjects: young people with 160+ IQs in Australia] who have [skipped 2 or more grades in K-12] report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school." https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf I don't know if you're at the 160+ level, but SAT scores are something of a proxy for IQ, and the severity of the social and academic frustration due to mismatch with age-peers can be judged directly.
  - eloff 6y ago
    I am above average intelligence, but not 160 level. My hope when we started homeschooling was to complete the grades faster, but it was still school and didn't hold my interest enough for that. I ended up finishing later than normal, mostly because I got side tracked with my newfound passion for computer programming. I took two years before college to explore that, and went to college reluctantly. When I got there I soon realized I had gaps in my knowledge, but generally was ahead of the 4th year students assisting the professors. I didn't want to spend 4 years and a great deal of money pursuing just a piece of paper, and dropped out.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    Community colleges can offer an alternative option, even in smaller suburban and semi-rural areas. I hated high-school, but I took classes at the local community college every night, my high school accepted the credits, and I graduated high school a year-early with transferrable college credits. My night-school experience gave me an opportunity to push my brain as far as I wanted, and it showed me what the 'real world' was like since my classmates were in their thirties, as opposed to the 'high-school world,' or whatever my eccentric parents would have cooked up.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    The SATs have a ceiling well below four standard deviations above the mean. I’m skeptical that any test is properly calibrated at that level—-even with oversampling it’s very difficult to do properly.
    - username90 6y ago
      Many IQ older IQ tests doesn't use 15 points per SD, so when you hear people talk about enormous IQ's like 160 it almost surely doesn't use a modern scale.
dboreham 6y ago
And in the past four years it has become government policy.

numakerg 6y ago

> famous sci fi author If it's the same author I found based on a cursory search from your profile, then "famous" is a bit of a stretch. > Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places I got a similar feeling reading about Chris Paolini. Homeschooled, raised in a remote place. Fed a lot of his early life experiences, particularly travel, into his novels but felt alienated from other kids.

brodouevencode 6y ago
> then "famous" is a bit of a stretch. That's a bit rude. I did the same cursory search and realized my friends and I are big fans. Just because you don't recognize the name doesn't mean others don't.
- bena 6y ago
  My name is known in certain small circles, it doesn't make me famous. So just because you recognize the name, doesn't mean he's what one would classify as famous.
  - brodouevencode 6y ago
    And the opposite is true too, which is my point. Maybe OPs circle is too tight.
eloff 6y ago
Well he's not JK Rowling famous, but he has sold over a million books which puts him in a pretty elite club author wise. Especially in sci fi, that's a lot. I'm very proud of my brother, he started down a very difficult career path and became very successful. All self taught.
- paperwasp42 6y ago
  Former publishing industry professional here. If he's broken the 1 million books mark, I wouldn't hesitate to call him famous. He's more successful than 99.99% of authors. Makes me very happy you celebrate his success so openly. In my time in the industry, I saw a lot of fiction authors dismissed by their family/friends who worked in non-creative industries. Thanks for being one of the awesome relatives. :)

jsnk 6y ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. Were you home schooled by your mother or your father? And whoever was home schooling you, were they working either part time or full time? I am interested in homeschooling as well.

eloff 6y ago
My mom stayed at home and my dad worked. But really because we could read well and follow the lessons, it wasn't a large burden for mom. She had a lot of reservations when we started, but soon realized she could handle it. I don't see how it would work if both parents are working, you'd need a nanny or something in that case.

BugWatch 6y ago

Would you mind revealing your brother's nom de plume (assuming he writes under one)?

eloff 6y ago
I can't reveal that here because it's easy to identify me from my HN posts and thus tie his pen name to his real identity.
- davidgay 6y ago
  If it's who the 'obvious' google search reveals, you've said too much already (and at least one the links that search gives reveals the family name directly).
  - jsmith45 6y ago
    I suspect the worry is in the other direction. Sure it is not difficult to figure out what the brother's pen name is. And if you know both his names, it is not hard to find connections between them. The part that popular authors usually want to avoid is making it easy to go from the pen name to the IRL name if you don't have some specific guess or anything. Right now I don't think going in that is particularly easy. If the grandparent however has said the name here it would almost certainly have made it easier to get from the pen name to the IRL name.

mgh2 6y ago

This might work for outliers/higher IQ/elite people in the HN community, but consider this: 1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule. 2. Not everyone is self-motivated to learn. Children, at critical developmental ages, are more prone to be led astray than "follow their passions" (at this age, really?). They will more likely be manipulated by vices if not constantly monitored. Note: Even adults struggle to find their "passion", good for the lucky few. 3. Not all parents are good teachers. Usually, responsible families understand the value proposition- they wish their children have a better future- and education is the most assured/common ticket that provides these opportunities. 4. School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style). Public schools, with all its flaws, are the best instruments to free the masses. Knowledge is democratized power to avoid the corruption that absolute power entails.

abnry 6y ago
There is a lot of bias towards homeschoolers so the wild success stories often get touted to counteract the prejudice. I was homeschooled but agree that it isn't for everyone, mainly because not everyone has the resources. It decidedly requires a middle class lifestyle. Also, parents need to have something of their life together beyond just financial resources. But people overestimate the competence required of a parent to teach. Probably the biggest thing I learned was learning how to learn, and in particular, doing that on my own. So reading the textbook in college was hardly a shock. If my parents didn't understand a subject, they could learn it with me, or find the resources I needed (including community college, online courses). Unschooling, however, I am not too sympathetic to. You need some structure.
- petertodd 6y ago
  > Unschooling, however, I am not too sympathetic to. You need some structure. For most kids you probably need some structure. For some, unschooling certainly works well; for others it's another term for "school dropout". I personally was both homeschooled and unschooled, for different topics, and a high % of the smartest people I know were unschooled. I really struggled to learn to read and write, even by grade five. So my parents took me out and my mom worked with me one-on-one intensively to learn phonics, which finally fixed that problem. Meanwhile, prior to that the biggest challenge I had in learning programming on my own is that I struggled to actually read the books I had on it. I think that unschooling taught me how to learn on my own, in a way that was very beneficial later in life. Yet again, I'd say based on my experience taking relatively high-level, proof-based, math classes in university many years later, that for me the structured experience of university math worked much better than trying to learn those subjects on my own (which I had also tried!). Yet, for high school math, there hadn't been much difference (I did attend highschool). Learning isn't one-size-fits-all.

an_opabinia 6y ago

> it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid This has been touched upon elsewhere by other commenters. But to at least ask you personally, would you concede that if you were doing well on tests despite the absence of the kind of cramming / teaching-to-the-test that the average schooled student receives, you could have done any kind of education, and in many ways, there is nothing special at all about homeschooling? Or that if your structure re-enacts this teaching, but it's a lot less time than the average student, you definitely have a natural aptitude for test taking? Are tests the only way we can robustly evaluate a kid's education, until they are 18? If so, will sports matter if you're getting bad test scores? What does? Here's the crazier conclusion. That people finger parental income or cultural values as the biggest factors of education outcomes, and in reality test performance is mostly genetic. It might as well be, from a policy perspective, randomly assigned - God rolls a 100 sided dice when you're born, and if it's a 1 or a 2 all standardized tests are easy for you. If you roll the other 98 numbers, the best thing is to cram. We don't need alternatives to traditional schooling. We need a way of evaluating kids that rewards genuine learning. Kids who are learning should be scoring poorly sometimes, and that's the exact opposite of how children are evaluated, and poor scores are the exact opposite of what most parents of high achievers want. Earnest parents are really seeking true learning. On the flip side, parents who send their kids to cram school or kvetch about college admissions not being fair because colleges consider factors other than totally and utterly gameable, zero-learning standardized tests - they are the antagonists. They are ruining our education system, they make school look the way it does, they are seeking a completely worthless advantage for their children (high test scores in the absence of valuable learning via cram school) for some cynically, utterly selfish devotion to values like making money and buying expensive things. Values so primitive and debasing that human cultures around the world have refined, multi-thousand-year-old refutations of materialism - opposition to materialism (asceticism) may be the most mature philosophy of all of history, at least as dominant as family values and theism. And then, to rationalize all of this, they find the least privileged and disadvantaged families and blame them instead! All the while pretending that there's some sort of equivalence of shittiness in their situations, because of some fucking number like income, between their families and the Other. It's complete and total bullshit. Some changes to the school system can help everyone live happier lives and learn more, like different children spending longer (or shorter) times in class. But really, we have to throw out tests. Or invent a test so sophisticated that it avoids being gamed by cramming.

sigzero 6y ago

We do the same. Our homeschool community is rather large and we have sports (you name it we probably do it). We even compete with other public schools.

3131s 6y ago

I wanted this, I essentially begged for it for 12 years with no success. I didn't need any extra motivation to read or do math problems and I was way above my grade level in both, but had behavioral problems because I was so bored in school. I still ended up with very high SAT and ACT scores too, but eventually broke down toward the end of college and graduated on time but with a few bad grades. My parents would have lost their minds if I had dropped out during any of the first three years when I also had an A-average GPA. The public schools I went to all had a gifted program in various forms, which most years was just one hour a week and taught topics that should have been available to every student in the school. Amazingly, the teacher showed us the structure of a URL in around 1994 when I was in first grade.

GHwirrr4 6y ago

Do you mind naming the books your brother has written?