Can I Really Homeschool? I'm Not a Teacher!

We’ve all just lived through the fiasco that was online classes and “at home learning” forced upon families for the last few years. While anyone with school-aged children felt this collapse in real time, we now have enough concrete data that the dramatic drop in student results is now statistically observable. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average math ability for students ages 9-17 has dramatically declined since 2020 (the first drop ever recorded), and the decline in reading ability is almost as large (the first drop since 1990).

By contrast, the top students are performing stronger than ever, with the difficulty of contests such as AIME and USACO getting more challenging each year. As a homeschooled kid myself who then went to Stanford University, I experienced many online classes growing up, and I had a very positive experience with my online classes. My current online students are likewise thriving in competitions and beyond. At-home online courses are not inherently the problem. However, here are three necessary ingredients for such classes to be a success for your child.

1) First, you don’t have to be a subject matter expert in order to make a significant difference in your child’s learning. However, you have to be extremely active in classes in order to keep your child motivated and interested. I see family after family throwing their kids into endless expensive classes, only to have the students stagnate in their abilities – and this includes families with highly educated and successful parents! By contrast, my mom knew no Latin, Greek, or classical mythology when she began homeschooling me. Still, she sat with me through my studies, helped me gather dates and materials for various competitions, organized my notes into study guides, created flashcards, and quizzed me on my translations. There is no class, no teacher, no program, no money that can make your kid learn; children best thrive with an in-person parental figure who is highly involved.

2) The online classes themselves also need to actually teach. Some classes create assignments like read 500 pages by tomorrow, yet the only accountability is a "discussion board" where nonsense comments suffice for full credit. Other classes have packets of historically inaccurate passages excerpted from Wikipedia, or even worse, worksheets unrelated to the subject matter that delve into inappropriate material for kids. Such classes are a waste of your child’s time. As the parent, be on top of what your kid is learning. Look through the class materials thoroughly before enrolling your child. Before your kid spends time on an assignment, read it yourself first. Email the teacher questions, if it is a class with a live instructor, or make your own choice about modifying the assignment as you see fit if you are teaching from a teacher’s manual. The class doesn’t have to incorporate groundbreaking pedagogical techniques in order to be better than a public school class; it simply needs to teach the subject matter at a comprehensible pace. If your child starts realizing that too many assignments are a waste of time, that incentivizes your child to ignore the parts of their classes that would actually be beneficial.

3) Take the pressure off of yourself to cover 12 subjects a day in a meticulously planned 8-hour workday. Instead, pick two or three subjects per day, and spend an hour or two per subject (or, 3-4 hours per subject if you’re trying to help your child with national competitions). Especially for younger students, school can be done by lunch. Make it fun, keep it simple, stay engaged yourself, and give your children time for productive play. Productive play involves anything from exploring the woods, to talking about life with family and friends, to building a magical world with blocks and dolls, to solving a Rubik’s cube. Children need exploratory experiences in the physical world with real humans in order to thrive, both personally and academically. Endless online classes become counterproductive; students quickly learn how to multitask with anything from TikTok to Roblox (often without their parents’ knowledge) during class if you drop off your kid on Zoom all day long. Instead, complement a predominantly screenless day with short bursts of useful online resources.

At the end of the day, the children who thrive the most have parental figures who are engaged and loving throughout their studies. You don’t have to be brilliant in order to help your child more than an overworked school teacher with 25 other children, several of whom are chewing on scissors; thoughtfully selecting classes together with your child, and going through the materials together, will do wonders for your child.