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Lesson plan: how to suck it up and go
This was an interesting post. Thanks. Note that your link to the NYP article doesn’t go there; you should fix that. The article is worth reading, but I had to google it.
I’m pretty sure that when I was homeschooling the costs never got up to 10K. That is to say, costs that would go away when my kid went back to school. I couldn’t really count music costs as part of homeschooling costs, because here we are at a fancy private school and still paying them. Likewise, my friend T couldn’t count Russian Math as part of homeschooling expenses because he sent his kids back to school but kept sending them to Russian Math. I don’t think anybody I associated with paid out more than a thousand a year for strictly homeschooling expenses. So many of the things we count on homeschooling – vacations, sports, memberships – are things we do even if kids are in school.
I think I recommended JHU CTY to you as a good way for kids to take math classes. My son found his teachers there to be very responsive. A session-based Calculus class would cost about $1800; self-paced classes are charged by time taken. Harvard Extension is a good local place to take classes face to face; a Calculus class there would cost about 1700.
Which is to say, I never enrolled my son in math classes while we were homeschooling. He was younger, and we were fine with Singapore books. I only enrolled my son in math classes once the inadequacy of our public school math curriculum became clear.
Can I get in touch with you to know more about JHU CTY programs? My kids go to public schools in relatively good school district but I am at my wits end with lack of rigor and open time they have.
Yes, as this very person in NYC (granted we spend time in both NY and London, which is having an enormous growth market in HS now btw). I’d say the costs of keeping the children out and involved do add up compared to being enrolled in public schooling. Some of these costs are just apart of the higher COL such as snacks out, and transportation.
Classes have been expensive in NYC since forever, and in London many are forming their own micro collaboratives using parents in the community (science led by a scientist parent for £5 a class for example). I find it a lot cheaper in London.
I’d benchmark costs we’ve spent per year between 5k to 15k, depending on the year.
I calculated this a while ago and determined each family most likely spends around $500 a month to cover.
We’ve done it all from the 40k per year upper east side elite private, to the flexi 20k per year part-time collaborative ‘school’, and public for a few months. We’ve made great friends from them all, but this part time between Lon and NYC has given us the opportunity to meet so many families from Europe.
This is not just an American phenomenon. It’s happening over there in droves, including France and Spain. While access is up, the quality of public education has dwindled across the board and parents are looking for solutions that are practical.
@jessica Curious what you know about getting plugged into these micro-collaboratives in London and throughout Europe. We, too, have been in many combinations of school for our only child (daughter): Classical Conversations coop, to private, to now private hybrid-classical.
My youngest is finally in college, with one more year to go, at UMass/Lowell, doing a STEM degree. We did the inner city public school route, heavily supplemented, because the last six years were at a Boston exam school. Even still, I hated the school system. It was heartbreaking to see my kids peers suffering, as well. Over 2 hrs a day just getting there and back, and no teenager should be made to wake up at 5:30 am. It’s inhuman. Every single year there were so many supplementals that it added up to $10k/year, easily. I often said we might as well be homeschooling, and if it had been just a decade later, I would have for sure. My nieces and nephews are homeschooling, and combo schooling. They’re all busy all the time; the parents look exhausted, but the kids are so impressive and thriving. I followed PT’s essays on college too, and agreed that in my own life college (and grad school) added little but networking. Most skills were honed on the job, or not. Still, with insight into the continuing bureacracy, my kids went to college, and got full scholarships, so I only had to cover the (substantial) housing expenses, and of course misc. expenses like a car, travel, computers, etc. They got work-study jobs, at least at first, and that gave them spending money, and then summer internships – which were paid. They thought they were “independent” before they actually were / are, but it’s a process. One of the best things I learned from following this education blog was that the process was just that, a process over time, and so individualistic to each kid, including their “village.” I thought at that time “no one else is going through this chaos” and I was relieved to find out many families were. Rich, or poor, kids cost us lots of time. Parenting is a committment, that I never doubted but I see many others did. Now that childrearing is over, I miss it terribly, but as I tell my patients about having babies, “if it wasn’t for amnesia, no woman would do it twice.” Ah, but that bundle of joy, was so worth it, right? I wonder if it isn’t false advertising, those beautiful little eyes, looking up at you with such love. Then, as an adult, they say “I love you,” and my heart just melts all over again. On it goes.