Not all home-schooling is for religious reasons. Sometimes it is just because the local school system is failing the kids. Or ins some cases, because the public school is teaching religious theory instead of science.

This sounds like one of those classic cases where the client thinks his knows what he wants but doesn't realize he's wrong.

First, why isn't the child in a regular school system?

Assuming that he's not in public school for some reason, what system is the parents using for education? There exist full homeschooling packages that are intended to give students all the necessary resources to learn.

Assuming he's using one of those and the parents find that the chemistry in it is lacking, why not part-time enroll the child in a local school? From what I understand this isn't all that uncommon for home-schooled kids to get science instruction.

Assuming that's entirely untenable, what about hiring a private tutor for science education? Is there a local university you can contact for resources on this?

Finally, why are you asking Slashdot and not a homeschooling community?

(I'm attempting to avoid any assumptions as to the reason for home schooling.)

At that age, I would suggest to show them what chemistry can do: blow things up (safely), make things turn different colors, make things smell bad, or burn things (again, safely!). Then go into why the stuff is doing what it is doing. Finally, once you explained why it is doing what it is doing, see if you can change things up to come up with different effects.

Leave the boring shit about valence electrons to later. Just show him what chemistry can do. If that doesn't hook him, move on.

Listen, Chemistry is not like Reading Riting and Rithmetic. Chemistry is a complex science. It cannot just be suddenly dropped upon an interested 10 year old and hope it sticks. The child needs to fully understand advanced mathematics like Algebra. He must also have proficient reading comprehension because Chemistry texts are not light reading. A basic understanding of Biology would also be greatly helpful. Then there's being able to conduct basic lab experiments to help the child grasp what actually happens with chemical reactions that just can't be appreciated on paper.

That said, from your post you or whoever is available in your family is grossly unqualified to teach this subject. Heck even in schools Chemistry is not usually taught to students that young. Your grandson is already behind. You acknowledge that. If the parents are unwilling to enroll him in school, then in order to get a proper science program taught he needs to have a professional tutor brought in. Not some random tutor who knows basics, but a tutor who can teach the math concepts as well as the introductory science concepts required before he can get into Chemistry. Having someone unqualifed even attempt to teach this will fail. Further, do not rely on the internet for this. Chemistry truly requires hands on experiments to understand and appreciate it.

I'm certain you could contact the local school and try to get more information from them. It's possible the local chemistry teacher would be open to helping.

I have cousins who were homeschooled for most of their school careers. They went to public high school, though, because there are so many resources and social experiences you have there that you don't have at home. They all graduated pretty much at the top of their respective classes. I have no problem with homeschooling if you can provide an excellent education at home.

This grandchild is below-average in reading, which is obviously a crucial component of primary education. Failing at that, and not being comfortable with science, the parents are probably not qualified to be homeschooling the child. It is reasonable, then, to assume that they are not doing it because they can do a better job than the school system. That means it could easily be for religious reasons, which I believe are a terrible reason to homeschool. The submission likely would have said otherwise if that were not the reason.

ASAP....

There are two types of homeschooled students.... dumb as a rock and socially inept

or good at taking tests but can't apply what they learned into real world problem solving and are socially inept.

This is an obvious failure of home "schooling". Send the kid to school. Let him learn to socialize for one, and get a well rounded education his parents apparently lack. The fact that he's had minimal science education for the first 4-5 grades of his life, is really a sad testament to this type of education.

And just because *you* hated your chemistry education doesn't mean it was bad. People tend to say things are "a waste of everyone's time" when they really mean "it's something I had no interest in / aptitude for".

I'm glad to see, judging by all the "Anonymous Coward" comments, that I'm not the only one who believes that parents that aren't specifically trained to replace the teachers their children would normally encounter in a public/private school *shouldn't* be allowed to home school. You are doing nothing but a HUGE disservice to your child(ren) by keeping them from their peers, sheltered from the world, and away from opinions that are different from yours. We all *NEED* these kinds of interactions in order to better cope with the world when we become adults and move out on our own.

If the parents that do this to their kids use the "schools aren't safe", "schools aren't teaching what I think they should be", or "schools are failing our children" excuses should *get involved* in their local school, and encourage all other parents to do the same. If their schools really are falling behind in some way, it's *THE PARENTS FAULT* for not being involved.

I specifically left out any of the varied religious excuses, as I don't believe they're valid -- religion has zero place in a publicly funded school, and should be reserved exclusively for church and home. If parents want their child to have some schooling with religious content, they need to pay to send them to such a school.

I also don't want to hear any of this "I don't have the time to get involved in (insert public school function) here" excuses. If you don't have the time to raise your kid(s) properly, DON'T HAVE THEM.

It doesn't sound like you or his parents are suited to school him, then. Send him to school before you ruin his life. You and/or his parents should be ashamed.

I was above average in everything. I scored above the 99th percentile on pretty much anything anyone cared to tell me I needed to learn and then test me on. And I knew the Bible, too.

u mad?

There are some episodes of Good Eats that would probably be useful.

He is home educated and doesn't read as well as schooled kids of his age. He hasn't had much science education and no chemistry at all. None of his parents or grandparents have chemistry education beyond the school minimum and none feel confident about teaching it.

At some point, someone might tell you that if you can't keep him up to the standards of the kids who aren't home schooled, he's going to need some remedial education and possibly be required to attend public school -- and possibly lose a year in the process.

I had some cousins who were home-schooled ... and there was a curriculum they were required to have covered. And if they didn't, you weren't allowed to home-school any more and would need to transition to public school. I think for high-school or even a little before they all ended up going back to public school.

So, are you helping or him or hurting him in the long run if you can't get him through what he needs? It's difficult to teach something you don't know enough about yourself.

The child may be behind due to learning disabilities (dyslexia, etc), that many of the school systems handle very poorly. I have seen children who have made it to 3rd grade not knowing how to read due to dyslexia but the school did not know because of clueless or careless teachers, overcrowding, or lack of well handled funding.

Don't always assume that the homeschooling is due to religious reasons. After all, they did come to a geek/nerd related web site to ask, rather then a church based web site.

On the same note, combine chemistry and home ec. I'm guessing it's harder to be bored when you can eat the results of your experiment.

Some cooking is biology (e.g. yeast and fermenting) but most is chemistry. What are baking soda and baking power used for? What gives foods different flavors (sweet, sour, salty, etc.)? Smell as a whole is why too advanced for that age, but you may want to look at specific odors, such as almond or banana. What is it that makes a banana smell the way it does vs. what you get in banana extract of flavoring used for cooking.

Another thing on the practical side, but not as much fun, is cleaning. Why do we use acid (bleach) for some cleaning tasks but base (ammonia) for others? Definitely cover why you don't mix the two (bleach and ammonia).

There's tons of home experiments, even with the post-9/11 issues with getting certain chemicals. Take a cup of every liquid in the fridge, put a small piece of meat in each. What's happens over the next week?

When you get the electrons and valence and that stuff, go to fireworks. Read & observe--this is not a field for home hands on experimenting. What is added to fireworks to get different colors? Why do different things have different colors when they burn?

All you need is a five-minute conversation with a bad school administrator and you will never ask "why isn't this child in school?" again. :-)

Let him learn to socialize for one, and get a well rounded education

By "socialize" you mean, get taunted for his slowness in reading, and get beaten down by the kids until all interest in anything dies.

Sounds awesome.

As for a well-rounded education, that's exactly why you would homeschool. The public schools teach to tests, not to understanding, or learning how to learn.

Why is this rated troll?

If he reads below grade level and none of his current teachers feel qualified to teach him, maybe he should go to school to be taught by qualified folks.

Home schooling should not even be an option if you are not qualified to teach the subjects the child needs or cannot bring in someone else to do so.

If all parents cared, school systems could focus on what they are best suited to doing -- educating. School systems "fail" when they have to pick up the slack from parents who won't/can't take responsibility for their own children.

Schools can not effectively manage malnourished, abused, ignored or otherwise un-nurtured children no matter how much they "care". Especially when they are dependent on support for the same people who don't think their kids are worth any investment of money or time in the first place.

I agree that universal (and I'll throw in equal) education is good for society. The question is how to bootstrap this potential good from a society with such perverse priorities.

Yes, the lack of reading ability is a poor sign, but not necessarily proof that the parents are slacking. My sister can read very well, but it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from my mom to get her there (my siblings and I were home schooled, obviously). If you had looked at her development at 9 or 10, you might have reached the same conclusion (parents are incompetent and/or don't care)... but neither were true. It just took a lot of time and effort with her, more than it did with my brother and more than it would take for most children her age. That skews results.

Your logic as to why the parents are doing it for religious reasons is also highly suspect. Even if the parents are incompetent, there's no reason to assume that they would recognize that (or that they wouldn't think the school system more incompetent even if they did recognize it). The parents believing they can do better is still absolutely a reasonable possibility, given what we know.

All of my children are in a home school program to specifically achieve the following:

* Dramatically improved science curriculum over state requirements.
* Aggressive reading and mathematics programs.
* Enhanced educational environment (a quiet, well equipped classroom).
* Teachers who really care, and want each child to be able to compete in a demanding global economy as adults. We love our students like parents should, because we are both.

In order to teach my nine year old chemistry, I do not have to be an expert chemist. I simply have to know more than a nine year old does about chemistry. It really isn't that hard, and it has been fun for all of us to expand our knowledge. If you are going to engage in home education, you can't do it sitting on the sidelines. You have to educate yourself first. Then you can teach. Expect more from the teacher than you do the student.

If none of the above is happening for your grandson, consider placing that child in public school. Many public education options are abysmal. If results from home education are worse than the public option, consider that a major red flag. Your benchmark should be a grade or two ahead in most subjects (unless the child has a learning disability).

Teaching at home doesn't work for everyone. It isn't always the ideal solution. I wish I had a bazillion and one dollars to hire private instructors with decades of experience to do the teaching. There is no doubt, though, that what we are doing is working. All of my children, even the ones who struggle, placed in the top 5% in the last round of state required testing. They are not geniuses. They simply know how to work. Something their peers tend to have a hard time with.

I think religious reasons are a fine reason to homeschool. I'd rather they deal with those personal matters at home, instead of demanding the public schoolteachers waste time acknowledging or debating their particular flavor of pseudo-science. And for the path those kids are likely to end up on, which might be theology or music or church administration, it's a perfectly adequate education.

No, a religious homeschooling is not setting those kids up for careers teaching biology or any of the sciences, but with a belief structure like that at home, those kids probably weren't going to end up contributing to the field anyway.

You are doing nothing but a HUGE disservice to your child(ren) by keeping them from their peers, sheltered from the world

Sheltered? Who is more sheltered, a kid that interacts with adults every day learning in the real world, or one that simply lives to avoid attack by the pack of adolescents they are forced into?

On Slashdot of all places we should welcome and embrace the idea that kids may well and truly be better off being with adults more often than children, until they reach a more mature age. But I guess it depends on if you want a mature mental state, or a childish one...

I was home-schooled all through junior high and high school. It let me figure out what I wanted to do before college. It gave me a sense of self-esteem that I did not have in school before. It gave me willpower to make my own choices instead of doing what everyone else did.

That was invaluable, and I maintain that every single child that can be home schooled should be. There is literally NOTHING a parent could do worse than most public schools will do with kids minds, and with the internet to help you with coursework you can easily equal a public school education.

Maybe they want their child to have a better education. When I was home-schooled for two years, I learned faster and more than I could have in public school. When I started public school again, the school wanted me to skip ahead a grade. I wish I could have been home-schooled my whole childhood.

About the original question, there are home-school co-ops out there that might be able to help. Also, I have known some home-schoolers to go to public school part-time and do the rest of their classes at home. In the later years, some home-schoolers take classes at the local community college for dual credit.

Really. Religious folks don't contribute to scientific discovery? Um...while I get your general point that religion and science are often at odds among the especially dogmatic (on both sides), maybe you need a refresher in history...you seemed to have skipped the chapters that discuss the advancement of civilization over the last 25,000 years.

He was improperly advised. Not his fault. Or do you believe that all students should read the educational requirements laws for their state and assume their advisers, the professionals doing that job for money, are incorrect? I'm sorry, but I usually assume that professionals know what they're doing in order to save my sanity.

His eight-year-old should be allowed to be an eight-year-old and his school should be chastised for its foolish zero-tolerance policies. The rampant CYA and zero tolerance are more destructive than that which they attempt to prevent.

In the dark ages, people married at 14.

A 10 year old is surprisingly suitable for a very stunning amount of complex information. Humans are far better at learning than you seem to believe.

Because all religious people wind up working for churches? I did not grow up in a religious home, however I am a theist. I'm also an engineer. The idea that religious people somehow do not or cannot contribute to society is weird at best. In fact there are other engineers on my team who are also theists and they do an excellent job. One coming to a logical conclusion that there is a God does not correlate to their ability to do work.

Now my daughter is being home schooled. Not for religious reasons but because public schools teaches to the lowest common denominator. If she was going to public school, she would be in pre-school, but she already reads, adds, subtracts, multiplies, does simple algebra (2 times duck = 2 ducks) and has basic science concepts. The only place she is lacking is writing (she writes like a kindergartner) and history/government. But she's only 5 and Kindergarten doesn't even teach that. So this weird concept on Slashdot that th== dumb is plain academic intolerance in action.

Starts with the parents though. You seem to want to blame the govt.

They couldn't possibly be concerned about their child's safety because of a lack of a trained responder at the school or a track record of poorly handling bullying. Nor could they be concerned about substandard results from our country's education system. They couldn't even be atheist liberal arts majors concerned about the influence of the religious right on curiculum.

The kid has a much greater chance of being hit by a car than he has of being hurt in a situation that could have been prevented by a "trained responder", yet I'm guessing you wouldn't suggest that the kid never cross a street.

Parents can have all sorts of reasons to want to home school their kids, but "lack of a trained responder" is not one of them.

I coach martial arts in a Chicago inner-city public high school. Way inner city, South Side. This is one of the schools that the political and media class would tell you is "failing" and that it's the fault of the teachers (and some knuckleheads would say there just needs to be more "trained responders"), but I can say without doubt that the hours those kids are in school is by far the safest of their day. I'll bet that even in the most affluent neighborhoods that the hours the kids are in school are going to be the safest of their day.

If you want to home school your kids because you don't want them being exposed to teh gays or because you don't want them learning all that non-biblical so-called "science" that's fine. Go ahead and doom your kid. If you're an "atheist liberal arts majors concerned about the influence of the religious right on curiculum (sic)" first, I would hope that whoever is home schooling you can teach you how to spell "curriculum". But second, I would say that both you and the god-botherer are making a huge mistake. With only a very very small number of exceptions, your kid is a lot better off in school, public or otherwise, than he is being taught by you at the kitchen table.

I have a friend who home-schooled his kid. Both he and his wife have PhDs and even they knew enough to hire tutors for most of the courses. And that was only because the kid had some very specific issues that made it difficult for him to go to school. His parents made it work because they were really really smart and really really rich, and they knew they weren't qualified to teach their kid on their own. (The kid is about to graduate from Northwestern University).

Home schooling is just another aspect of the continual effort to devalue expertise. Today, if you're a scientist you can't possibly know jack-shit about climate change because, hell, you're a scientist, and the man on the radio says that's all baloney. If you're a world renowned economist, you can't know shit because hell, you're a liberal. If you're a college professor, clearly me and momma can do a much better job of educating little Johnny. If you're a journalist, well, everybody knows you don't know anything because you're part of the "mainstream media", so everything in the newspaper is clearly bogus. Once expertise has been sufficiently degraded then you can get people to believe absolutely anything, because everybody knows the only true science is right there in the bible and by the way, I'll explain the bible to you, because if you read it on your own you'll only get the wrong idea. You can tell people anything and they won't be able to tell whether or not it's true. It's the most convenient way to destroy small-d democracy. I'm betting every single one of you can think of ways expertise is being degraded. and it's turning us into a nation of frightened dummies who all think they're smart as hell and by-god they'll be the ones teaching their children how to spell "curiculum" thank you very much.

Idiocracy.

Really? I thought all the expensive ones were drug-ridden. Not the crack-smoking in the halls between the gang shootouts, but the I-have-the-money-to-buy-the-stuff-and-mom-and-dad-are-never-around weed/coke/pills/sex party stuff that is just pervasive in expensive religious schools. It's all fun and games until they're hocking their (and your) fancy electronics to pay for their habit.