People quizzing my dd

[Yooper]

We are unschoolers but I think this applies in the more general homeschooling category.

We recently traveled to see family. Dd is 6 and this is the first time we have seen some family members since dd was of "school age". We noticed right away that people felt inclined to "quiz" dd. Basic addition/subtraction and spelling questions. When we were there to witness it, we distracted the conversation away from the quizzing. But dd is old enough that we were not necessarily following her around all of the time.

Dd enjoys the quizzing. It makes me uncomfortable. The people who are doing this are "checking up" on us because they do not believe homeschooling is a good thing. These people do not even know we are unschooling but I assume imagine we are doing a school-at-home approach.

Should I attempt to make this stop? I mentioned to my mom and sister that we did not really like it when they quiz dd. Both agreed to stop but I caught them again later. When confronted, my sister said that dd likes it and asked to play "the math game". She is probably right. Dd probably did ask. I still find it slimy.

And what to do when dd no longer enjoys it and encounters it when out of our direct supervision? I am tempted to tell her to say "mommy and daddy do not believe in math." But there is probably a more constructive way to handle it.....

[laohaire]

This is only one perspective, but here it is. I was (am) a nerd and liked academics as a kid. I went to public and private school, not homeschool. Some relatives and family friends liked to quiz me too, and I liked it. I got a lot of positive attention from it ("she's so smart!") and it was a way to relate to the adults especially given that I was the youngest kid in my family at the time so was often the only child.

So from where I'm sitting, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with checking up on home/unschooling. But of course you know better than I do.

You can arm her with a polite demurral in case she stops liking it:

Relative: What's the square root of 64?
DD: (with smile) No, thanks, I'm not up for playing right now. Can you pass the bean dip?

[prairiebird]

I get this with my kids too, unfortunately. Over Thanksgiving, my FIL was asking them about the names and capitals of states. My 7 and 9 year old do not know this yet other than the few we've covered, and so FIL took this as a sign that the kids aren't learning. However, in our current district, Social Studies/Geography isn't even started until 5th grade. Since they are not covered in the standardized tests for those grades, they've trimmed this off until later. So if he were quizing them and they were attending their PS, they wouldn't have been able to answer anyway!

We are covering states now, and we'll be starting countries next year. But it really doesn't matter to me, because while sure, my son doesn't know the capital of Missouri right now off the top of his head, he could tell you all about ancient Greece because he chose that for his unit study.

So I don't really think there's much you can do about the quizzing- people are going to do it anyway. And I think while some are out there to quiz a homeschooled kid and prove it doesn't work, there are people that will just randomly ask questions of kids anyway. But in your heart, you know where your kids abilities are.

I think it's just that there's this image out there of Homeschoolers being these super-gifted beings that know all and that's why they are homeschooled- it doesn't help that a lot of the positive articles are about the super-elite of the homeschooling crowd. Sometimes people don't get that there are struggling and average homeschoolers as well because they see all the kids in the news that are IDing every country and winning every spelling B at second grade or something. They think that if your child isn't a supergifted kid, than it's because you pulled them from school- never mind that they might have been worse off or just the same in public school.