What a Life!

When people ask me why we homeschool, my answer is simple: I was homeschooled for my first year of school, and it was the most fun year of school I had until I got to college.

That’s not to say I had a bad education. Every single day of my education from grade school through college was spent in private school.(1) Good private schools. I got good grades. Scored well on achievement tests. Had lots of opportunities in things I did well – like music.

At the same time, there were lots of things I didn’t do, due to the constraints of a classroom. My grade school years were spent in multi-grade classrooms. My class was one of the more sparse years. I was either the only one in my grade or had one other person with me. [Other classes had a half dozen students or more.]

My teachers made out an assignment sheet every week, and every day I sat down and worked through my assigned work. No one ever explained any of my assignments to me because I was done with them before they ever had a chance. Many days I was done with my homework by 10:00, which meant that the rest of the day – except for recess – I had nothing to do. The rules were that I had to stay in my seat and be quiet. I read a lot of books. And I spent a lot of hours sitting in my seat being quiet.

Steve’s favorite part of grade school was recess. He went to public school for his grade school years, a private high school, and then a public university. In grade school, they tried to put him in an extra class for gifted students once. The only problem? It was during recess. He told his mom they wouldn’t let him go out to recess any more, and she got him released from the gifted class. His recollection of grade school is that he already knew what they taught him before they taught it to him, if you know what I mean.

It wasn’t until I was in the tenth grade and went away to boarding school that I had homework that I didn’t get completed during school. There were 92 students in my graduating class, so it was a much larger school that I had attended during my grade school years. We attended classes every day and then had study hall in the dorms at night. I took honors classes, even though the teachers didn’t think kids from little schools like mine should be in honors classes, and I did quite well. I had a B+/A- grade average when I graduated, which would have been higher had I applied myself a little more. But I was accustomed to sloughing off and didn’t see the need to work any harder than I had to. My sister, who went to the same schools I did, was a National Merit Scholar. I never took the PSAT (because the college I intended to go to only required the ACT) so perhaps I might have been one, too.

Now college was a whole new experience. Finally I could take classes that interested me rather than drumming through what everyone had to do. The college I went to had the most wonderful honors classes. They combined history with literature. Arts with science and religion. I hadn’t really cared for those subjects before, but when seen in light of each other, I found them fascinating. I took German, which I’d wanted to learn since I was a little kid. I was pre-med(2) so I took all the basic science classes. And I majored in Humanities, which was basically an interdisciplinary liberal arts major. I loved my classes, and I loved learning.

So now I’m a mom. Before Ben reached school age, somehow I learned about The Well Trained Mind and read it. I was hooked. My kids wouldn’t dally their days away at school sitting in their desk quietly waiting for everyone else to finish their homework. If they already knew something, they could move on and learn something else. We could go on field trips and learn things first hand (vs through a textbook). And when they were done with school, they could go out and play.

Steve wasn’t so enthused initially. But when I talked about teaching our children Latin in grade school, he started to get excited. His specialty is science, and learning all of those scientific names would have been so much easier if he had learned Latin. He took two years of Spanish in high school (just like everybody else) and he never uses it. And the thing about learning Latin – when you go on to learn another language later on, it’s like learning a band instrument after learning how to play the piano: you already know the basics so it’s much easier to learn.(3)

Now here we are. Last winter (2008) I gradually began homeschooling Ben to see if it was going to work for us like I had hoped. Last summer I submitted our paperwork and we became official homeschoolers. Now, with a year of homeschooling under my belt, I am loving it more than ever. We are doing so many fun things that I never got to do in school, things that I would have loved if someone had taken the time to do them with me. If Ben were enrolled in our local public schools (which get very high reviews by the people who live in our town), he would be home around 3:15 every day. As a homeschooled kid, his day is his own after 11:00 every morning. When you hear what we cover in school every day, it will be clear that he is being challenged academically.

In life, whenever we make a choice to do A, we are making a choice not to do B. With education, the choice may be between two public schools, between public school and private school, or between public or private school and homeschool. Yes, there are things that can be done in a group setting that cannot necessarily be done in a home setting, but there also things that can be done in a home setting that can never be done in a group setting. We have chosen an individualized education for our children, and for us, it is working very well.

Heidi over at Mt. Hope Chronicles was my inspiration as I was building our curriculum piece by piece last winter. She gives her reasons for homeschooling here: I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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1Well, save that one summer class – Organic Chemistry – that I took at a public university.

2Until that ill-fated Organic Chemistry class I took at the public university.

3Unless, of course, you decide to learn a non-Latin based language like Chinese, and then you would be starting all over again.