Being a homeschooling parent has a lot of challenges. Chief among them is being sure that the things I teach are accurate, and fulfilling, and that the child is learning what she should in order to stay close enough to her age group that she could easily matriculate with her age group if she should for some reason need to enter the mainstream at any point in the future. But when one of the kids homeschools with a regular teacher over Zoom, it can also be challenging! Specifically when the teacher says something that is complete nonsense!
Today gave a perfect example of that, when my 12 year old’s teacher was teaching her class about the US Census, and in the topic about the question of citizenship she said that one of the reasons that citizenship status would be asked is because non-citizens don’t pay any taxes. My immediate thought is that she has just contributed to making a group of Nationalists, and possibly racists with that one statement.
The reason I think that is because I have several non-citizens in my own immediate family. To be accurate, one got his citizenship late last year, but he has worked and even bought a house here in the US for a few years prior, and the other two are still not citizens at this time. All pay or have paid payroll tax, all who own property pay property taxes, and the one who does not own, pays rent to an owner who pays property taxes on the place he lives in, and not one of them is exempt somehow from sales taxes. So, every single one of them pays a plethora of taxes just like any US Citizen does. There are no free rides among them.
I understand that there may be people who are in the US illegally, who have to take pay off the books, and stay under the radar. But a blanket statement that non-citizens don’t pay taxes is completely inaccurate. I realize that in the rush of teaching that a statement like that can come out mistakenly, and that a person saying it might do so on accident, and without meaning to.
What is hard is not wanting to jump in as an adult and correct the situation. After all, why should a whole class of kids carry the kind of biases that something like that can create away from the class? But then, when the kids are in a classroom, parents never hear things like that in the first place unless their child happens to mention it.
I guess the real advantage is that I have the opportunity to mention it to my own child, and correct the potential bias, and do it in a way that hopefully does not undermine the teacher, and gives them a way out by mentioning that it may have been an oversight on their part. I think it is also important to raise a kid who knows how to get along socially with people she does not agree with, so she has to know how to live with the statements that she does not have to confront, and know when to confront them, when she is old enough and knowledgeable enough to do it.
At any rate, it is probably a little thing, but it is aggravating, just as it is when the teacher’s religious biases come across in the class. But considering those biases do come across and they do hint at their particular beliefs, I have to credit them for still teaching proper science on evolution and such, though the dominant religion in this area, and the ones the teacher hints at is creationist.
So, there are pluses and minuses to it, and like anything, there is finding a proper balance to it. It is just one of the challenges to being a homeschool parent, and at the same time, in the modern ‘woke’ culture, there is the challenge that teachers must face with all the parents who are improperly or partially woke, and the ones who are not woke at all. It has got to be hard. And then there is the unnecessary hair splitting over things like which non-citizens pay taxes or not.