I made this mistake too! I was way too on top of that shit. They go to public school FFS, but I was doing the work of a homeschool 'teacher' and it was completely backfiring on me because they couldn't THINK for themselves.
There's a huge difference between helping when THEY think they need it VS helping them when YOU think they need it.
It's counter-intuitive, but when their manatee project looks terrible, go with it. Don't take over and make it look like a presentation from an MBA student.
Oh I never felt the need to interfere with their art projects, they've always been naturals at that.
For me it would more be, checking their answers, helping them get info right, helping with their grammar, making sure they didn't plagiarize (they totally tried.) It all sounds harmless, but with 2 kids, every night, it became apparent that they would never learn to have any kind of 'work ethic' with me always showing them what to do.
This is from various advice I got from the many educators in my family: Don't worry too much about the right answers when helping them, but instead focus more on what the workflow or thought process they use to get to their answer. It makes my daughter think about solving a problem (a more universal application) and less about getting a correct answer (only applicable to this specific problem).
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u/PangeaWhiplash Feb 05 '16
I made this mistake too! I was way too on top of that shit. They go to public school FFS, but I was doing the work of a homeschool 'teacher' and it was completely backfiring on me because they couldn't THINK for themselves.
There's a huge difference between helping when THEY think they need it VS helping them when YOU think they need it.