I'm in Ontario, Canada. While policies vary from school district to school district, where I live attendance is handled extremely casually. There are no truancy officers in school. No truancy cases cluttering up family court. No minimum 5 or 6 days of unexcused absence or doctors notes required. Grade advancement is based on age until high school (when it's based on credits earned). And funding is not tied to butts in seats.
According to a family lawyer I know, truancy law is typically only invoked when there are other legal issues bringing the family to court, usually child neglect.
I know people who have taken children out for half a year or more, to travel to their homeland. I know children who, due to anxiety or learning issues, attend school half time. When I began homeschooling my children (and by the way, there's no oversight of homeschoolers here), the school made a point of telling me that if I wanted to have them drop in just for something like gym class, that would be absolutely fine.
And, somehow, this laissez-faire system seems to be working. Canada consistently ranks high on Mathematics and Reading in international standards. Not so hot in Science, but still well above the US.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html
I'm also curious about the concept of not knowing how to do the work if you haven't had the lesson. Shouldn't the textbook HAVE the lesson? If it doesn't, doesn't that mean it's a pretty rotten textbook? I was in grad school before the textbooks couldn't be relied upon (or we didn't even have a textbook and it was soley lecture-based), with the exception of a Linear Algebra book and an Organic Chemistry book later in college. (and sadly both involved horrible professors, one of whom was tenured and didn't care and had extra credit questions about the Beatles, and the other one was a creep who had such a curve that my 50% tests were a B-, and he just wanted women to come to this office for extra tutoring)
I agree, but sadly I have seen some texts and materials that specifically restrict all of the instruction to the teacher. Typically it's because the student manuals are intended to be reproduced and handed out sheet by sheet. So what you end up with are work pages that are incomprehensible without the teacher's guide.
It's a cheaper way to do things, but really unfortunate for a child who doesn't learn well in a lecture-based environment. If they miss the teacher's explanation, due to a physical issue such as fluid in their ears, or an attention issue, or a subtle learning difficulty, they're lost.
I've seen some depressingly crappy math texts, used by my own school district.
I'm now using Singapore for math with DS, and I bought the teacher manual for this set of books, and it's USELESS. I won't be buying the teacher manual going forward. I read through the lesson in the Textbook, go through it with DS, then he does the Workbook. The teacher manual is just to tell you "do this page of the textbook and this page of the workbook together" and also has extra things to do if the kids aren't getting it.
Singapore math is brilliant! I took my kids through it, combined with Miquon Math (check if out:
http://miquonmath.com/). It completely changed how I look at math. Some of the topics I taught my daughter in Grades 3 and 4, are still coming up in high school math.
I support the public school system and think it's valuable and necessary. But I think both my kids got a significantly superior elementary math education at home. And I didn't make it past Grade 8 in math!
I teach Latin to all the levels in my school (including some 8th graders). Yes, it would be nice if they could understand what the book is talking about (nominative, cases, tenses, etc), but we don't have those things in English that they can relate to, so, no, sometimes the textbook cannot teach the lesson that they're missing while they're off visiting Mickey and Rapunzel.
When my kids took Latin, I actually broke out my old Cambridge Latin books, which explained everything an English speaker might need to know. And quite clearly, too!
A good beginner text, in any subject, should contain all the information a person needs to learn the material. But I do understand that teachers have to work with what the school district gives them, and this may not always be possible.
More than once, in Latin and Physics and other courses, we've had to go back to older, more clearly written, texts, in order for our kids to better grasp the material. I'm not impressed with many of the modern texts I've seen.
I don't have kids yet, but I'm a little surprised at how some of these districts/teachers react (legal action? jail time? what!) to parents making this informed decision. To me, it's a little bit overstepping of bounds... parents know what the downsides are to taking their kids out for a vacation (or something else legit).
I feel the same way, and in many of these districts, we'd have opted to homeschool. When I send my children to school, I expect the teachers to assist them in their learning and expand their knowledge base, particularly in areas I can't teach myself. I'm not abdicating responsibility for their education, and I don't like the idea of any institution having that much power over me and my child.
I will say, though, textbooks aside, I've been VERY impressed with the high school education my children have been receiving. They're learning concepts that weren't discussed at all in the eighties, when I was in high school. Even my daughter's doctor was impressed at how much of the university science curriculum has moved back to the high school level.
Not all teachers do the same thing every year, nor are they in the same place or move at the same pace (as another teacher pointed out).
