Homeschooling in 2001
[Reposting from something I wrote in 2013.]
This blog post is being written in response to a request from our dear friends E&C, who are embarking on a new journey to homeschool their children. I thought it was an opportune time to answer their questions on beginning homeschooling by telling our own homeschooling story.
We were first introduced to the concept of homeschooling via a business venture that we were involved in. We attended a conference and one of the speakers was a multi-millionaire couple who had homeschooled their kids. The kids were all grown and had successful businesses of their own. We got out of that business years ago, but thank God every day that we stumbled upon the homeschooling lifestyle because of it. Some of the things we learned:
Lesson #1. A formal education isn’t a prerequisite for success in life.
At the time our child was enrolled at a delightful preschool run by our alma mater. WUNS utilized the Reggio-Emilia approach and we saw that our child really flourished in that environment. At the time, Reggio-Emilia wasn’t as widespread as it is today.
Lesson #2. A child flourishes when he/she is allowed to explore personal interests and when we don’t put limits on his/her learning. The project approach is an excellent way for children to learn, although it’s only one of many.
After preschool we looked for a kindergarten school that offered a similar program, but the only one we found was unaffordable to us. After our oldest child graduated from preschool, we were “forced” to put her in parochial school because that’s what we could afford and what was convenient. We pulled her out after a month, for various reasons, mostly academic. After the Reggio experience, their program just wasn’t good enough.
Lesson #3. Educators need to pay attention to a child’s learning style, capacity, current skillset. There is no such thing as one-program-fits-all when it comes to learning.
All this time I had been researching about homeschooling more. The very first homeschooling book I read was the Colfaxes’ Homeschooling for Excellence — this family homeschooled their boys, three of whom eventually made it to Harvard. I also read several homeschooling classics from the library:
- How Children Learn by John Holt
- How Children Fail by John Holt
- Learning All the Time
- A Home Start in Reading
- A Strong Start in Language
- An Easy Start in Arithmetic
Lesson #4. There is nothing to be afraid of. There are many who have paved the way before you, with great results. Trust their experience and example, and trust your instincts as a parent.
I culled information from several secular and Catholic homeschooling groups on America Online and put together my first curriculum that way. We joined a local Catholic homeschooling group, but it just wasn’t a good fit for us at the time so we quit going after the first couple of meetings.
Lesson #5. You don’t need a homeschooling group to homeschool your child. (I say this because I’ve heard people say, “But I don’t know anyone around me who homeschools.” Don’t let that be a hindrance. This is clarified farther in Part 2.)
At the time, we were still very much of the persuasion that all we needed to find was a good school district to live in and our worries could be put to rest. So when we moved to Texas in 1998 for my husband’s job, and we found out that the school district was considered exemplary, we went ahead and put her in public school.
Just ten months after moving to Texas, his company decided to merge with another, and we were to be moved to Minnesota, which we didn’t want to do. So the hubby interviewed with several companies, and one worked out — which meant a move to Ohio. The move put us in a great, multi-awarded school district once again, so we put our daughter again in public school.
I kept up with both homeschooling and public schooling trends, and from time to time would wonder whether we should go back to homeschooling. In the interim, the Columbine shooting happened. We were also beginning to question certain elements of the public school system. Our daughter was part of the gifted program, but every now and then a niggle of doubt would cross my mind if this was indeed the best fit for her. I felt as a mom that it was both challenging and not challenging enough for my child. On the one hand, she got to do things that the “regular” students didn’t, but there still seemed to be limits to what she could accomplish and many of the rewards associated with the program struck me as forced and artificial.
Lesson #6. External rewards usually aren’t the best way to motivate children to learn.
We moved to Pennsylvania on assignment in 2001, and decided that since our daughter would have moved to a new school anyway, going back to homeschooling wasn’t going to be that much of an adjustment for her. Boy, were we wrong about that!
I had continued to do research into homeschooling through the years, but still thought myself unprepared to design our own curriculum for 5th grade. Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind was published in 1999 and I had read it cover to cover, but it overwhelmed me more than anything. We were also expecting our fourth child, and along with the move and two children ages 5 and under, it was all just too much for me. We decided to enroll her at Angelicum for the year, just to see how it will go.
What followed next — our first year back homeschooling — we will always remember as “The Nightmare Year”. She had been used to the public school schedule and demanded that we “do school at home”, i.e., a set time for each subject, lunch time, snack time, play time, etc. Learning that homeschooling was a LIFESTYLE and not a PROGRAM was difficult for her and for me. Between cooking and cleaning and changing diapers and grocery shopping and laundry, we had to figure out how learning was going to happen. It helped that by that time I had found an awesome online support group and shortly after, a local one.
#Lesson 7. Homeschooling is a lifestyle, not a program. It is woven in the every day, in family, in faith. It is not limited by place or season.
Part 2 is here.
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