Why We Homeschooled
When I chat with a new acquaintance, nothing either perks up or stops cold a conversation faster than my answer to the question, "Where did your son go to high school?"
Sometimes I say simply, "He didn't." Yes, we are one of those families: homeschoolers. When we began homeschooling, our son was seven, and I had no idea we would continue through high school. Now that he is finishing his college freshman year, I find myself reflecting on our 10 years of home education, especially in light of recent media coverage of homeschooling that included a call for parents of gifted children to keep their children in public schools so as to provide "the magical collaboration that is so essential to learning."
Why did we homeschool? The reasons we continued to homeschool were different from why we began.
We began because the traditional classroom was not a good fit for our son. There was nothing wrong with him, unless being insatiably curious, self-directed, unusually sensitive, and an introverted learner are wrong. There was nothing wrong with his teachers or classmates. It just wasn't a good fit, not at his age and not for his learning or personality needs.
As parents, we thought of our decision to homeschool for a year as a stopgap solution, a way to buy us time to research other schools. He saw the year differently. Wanting to begin homeschooling as soon as school ended in June, he said, "Now I can finally start learning!"
A year passed. He had never been happier. We met regularly with other homeschoolers, as well as families whose children were still in school. He had the alone time he craved to pursue a wide variety of interests, from reading Isaac Asimov short stories and novels to studying all the literary references in Peanuts comics, from weekday nature classes to long hours at our local library, browsing the stacks. The best way I can describe that first year to non-homeschooling friends is to remember what it was like before their children went to school, when they soaked up all new experiences and learned simply by being in the world and around other interested learners, both children and adults. That's what it was like, just at a higher level of learning. He was no longer shutting down and could participate in the "magical collaboration" of learning in a way he could not in a classroom.
At the end of that first year, he answered the question "Do you want to go back to school?" with a certain, "no," so we continued for the next year, and the next, and the next.
In the end, we stayed with homeschooling not to fix a situation that wasn't working so much as because we finally found a form of education that was as close to a perfect fit as we could imagine. Each year we adjusted our resources and approaches to fit his changing needs. As he grew older, he took more responsibility for his education, such as choosing online high school classes or, as a high school sophomore, enrolling part-time at a local university, studying Ancient Greek and chemistry.
By the time he moved into his college dorm last fall, we not only knew he was ready, we also knew that homeschooling helped to get him there. His self-motivation is intact. He is not burned out from a grueling high school homework schedule or the craziness of the college prep life. Just recently he told us, "I think I needed homeschooling when I was younger, but I'm most grateful that I homeschooled during high school."
Homeschooling isn't for everyone, just as any given school or classroom approach isn't right for all students. However, when homeschooling works well, it can be, dare I say, magical.
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