How we decided to homeschool
Tammy at Just Enough is collecting the stories of how people decided to homeschool. I usually write about what we are learning at our house and how my ideas about teaching are changing. But I figured this was a good instigation to write up the story of how we started.
My wife and I never really talked about school very much until after G was born. We pretty much agreed, based on our experiences, that public school was useless but more or less harmless and private school was useless and expensive. So we’d just put the kids in public school and save the money.
Before G was one year old, we were already getting admonished not to homeschool our kids — mostly the usual nonsense. And we hadn’t even thought about homeschooling. Ironically, this planted the idea in our minds. I started to think: if I don’t expect my kids to get much out of school, why should I make them spend so much time there?
At that point it was just a thought, but a growing one. It made me reflect on my school experience. Every year I was naively excited about all the new things I’d learn. By the end of the first grading period, my parents would be getting called in for conferences. I was counting the days until summer. It was nice to think that my kids might not need to do that.
We still had made no decisions, and hadn’t really talked about it much until we started thinking about kindergarten. I started looking through what would be expected of kindergarteners and it seemed like G more or less knew what was expected on the academic side. He might not have the same take on obedience the teachers have, but I would take that as a sign of success.
He wouldn’t be able to start kindergarten for another year and a half. Should we stop learning and wait? It’s not like we are flashcard parents, it is just that life in our family has always been “school”, even before we knew about homeschooling. Talking about ideas is fun. That is just what we do.
That got us looking at private schools. Maybe we would put him in kindergarten a year early, then move him into public school. So we went down to the fanciest sounding private school in town, prepared to spend more money on school than we spend on food for the family in a year. Prepared to spend hours in the car shuttling back and forth, even though we’ve designed our life around not driving. We were completely unimpressed.
Q: Kids learn very asynchronously. What would you do with a kid who excelled at Math but was lagging in reading?
A: We have special counselors that will work with kids who are having trouble in an area. They can come out of the regular classes to work on the areas where they need help.
Our thoughts: Great he’s good at math so we can ignore that. It’s an expensive cookie cutter — slice off what doesn’t fit, mush the rest into form.
Q: How would you handle a kid who ignores the homework but still aces the exams?
A: That could never happen at our school.
Our thoughts: Yeah right. You do everything “one grade level ahead” of public schools, and no kid could ever keep up with such a pace on his own. Hah.
And so on.
It took us a little while to realize this, but that interview closed the door on schooling for us. Since then we started talking with each other, we started talking with our neighbors who homeschool, and we started paying attention to how our kids learn. I write about these growing observations to organize my thoughts (and not forget them). Our fears are fading fast, and at this point we can’t imagine why we would send our kids to school.
