Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Private Homeschool Teacher

We live in a state where it is legal to hire a private teacher to homeschool your children and we are seriously considering it.

Does anyone have personal experience with this? Resources? Advice? I'd love feedback from those that have some knowledge/experience with this style of homeschooling.

Pros/Cons. Logistics. Oversight [quality control]. Expectations.

Ideally, we want someone capable of teaching using a strong visual-spatial [big picture, top-down] approach. Someone capable of limiting the amount of auditory/sequential instruction.

Thoughts? Advice? Resources?

I would love to be a private homeschool teacher.

Absolutely no relevant experience here, but one question for potential teachers leaps to mind. I've seen many comments in this forum from homeschooling parents pretty freaked out by how fast their child is blowing through curriculum, how quickly they need new material, and how deep and wide the parents need to go to feed the child's demand for learning. And those are *parents*, who should have some idea of what they're in for.

An experienced teacher may expect to work at a certain pace, use certain kinds of material, focus on certain kinds of tasks and questions.... You would want to find a special kind of educator who could cope with tossing most of their own expertise out the window and accepting the child's pace/ approach.

OMG! I can't believe that option is illegal. I've been considering it
as well.

We did this when we homeschooled. We hired a teacher we knew who had recently gone part-time. She knew my son and was happy to teach him. I told her we were skipping him as part of homeschooling, so she investigated state standards for several grades above where he had been, and taught to those standards. She only did language arts, but she also checked in on his science work. He also had a math teacher he met with via Skype (he still does the math lessons even though he's back in a b&m school). The rest of his classes he did online. In our state, parents can set up homeschooling however they desire, so this was a great option for us. One other thing was that she was incredibly affordable-- less than his math teacher-- so I paid her more than she asked for, which made us both happy.

Honestly... you might, in light of that set of facts, be looking for a parent/relative who has home-schooled their own HG+ child/family member's child.

I'm not sure what the accreditation rules are in your state, but it's something that I would look into.


Otherwise, yes, you're likely looking for an educator who is willing to break with what they "know" of child development, in a pretty big way.