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Originally Posted by phroggies  A friend of mine once said, more or less, "I'm so impressed that you're confident enough to think you can teach all the necessary subjects." My snark-o-meter hit the redline and I muttered something about being pretty good at math and science for someone with an English degree. She went on, "I mean, maybe up to second grade, but after that---?" at which point, mercifully, the conversation was interrupted.
I totally believe you don't have to have a Ph.D. (or even a B.A.) to teach your children--but I actually do. Moreover, I see everyday in my classroom well-intentioned but not especially intelligent students wanting to be education majors (there are exceptions, of course; I speak of the rule). The thing that boggles my mind is that this friend does too. I'm trying to figure out how fabulous her PS elementary experience must have been for her to feel that I couldn't get my son through third grade.
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The thing is, and I'm speaking as a teacher here too, the vast majority of teachers are ones who majored in education, a college major routinely attracting students who score in the dead-bottom third of the SATs -- obviously not a perfect indicator, but a telling one, and a standard against which other students can be measured. In my own experience, and this is obviously not all-encompassing, the vast majority of elementary-school teachers are really not particularly well-educated in core subjects. OBVIOUSLY there are exceptions, but you don't need to go very far to find parents kvetching about yet another classroom newsletter from their child's ES teacher containing seventeen "typos" -- "typos" that apparently include trouble with subject-verb agreement and shaky command of
they're, their, and
there.
Again, obviously there are exceptions to the rule. However, the rule is a rule for a reason -- for a host of reasons, actually. Maybe I'm completely full of it (and not for the first time), but one big reason we're homeschooling is we thought we could do better than the public schools. So far, so good. We'll see later; maybe that will change my mind.
When the schooled kids in the neighbourhood recently had Spring Break they kept asking me if I "let" ds have Spring Break too! 
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