First Day of No School

Today children in our area went to their first day of school. But not Esther. We’ve taken the homeschool plunge. Here is the long and the short of it. You can read whichever fits your attention span.

The short:
After a couple of years of thinking, studying, and praying, we’ve realized that homeschool is what is right for our family at this time. The academics and flexibility would be hard to beat, and we get extra family time as a bonus.

The long:
We started thinking about homeschool while we were in Grenada. We met someone who was homeschooling because she actually wanted to, rather than because the schools there weren’t ideal. After asking a million or so questions and generally bothering her as much as possible, we started doing our own research and found out how awesome homeschool can be.

Then we moved to Michigan, which we later found out is one of the most homeschool friendly states in the country. There are no laws to follow, no forms to fill out, no records to keep, and no standards to meet. You simply just teach your child the way you think is best. It couldn’t be easier.

Along with Joy School last year, we did some academic homeschooling to experiment. It went better than we thought it would. So now that we have a kindergartner in the family, we are officially homeschooling.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. Flexibility in schedule: We need this especially this year. Cameron will be going off to various interviews that we might want to tag along for. He’ll also be doing a rotation in Provo in March, and we’ll definitely want to go with him for that. He’ll finish up school at the end of April, and it’ll be great that we can move when we want instead of waiting for the school year to finish out.

2. Power: We love being in charge of our own family. If we want to take a vacation in October, we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to have access to our children. We don’t have to worry about sick days. We can have a Christmas party instead of a generic holiday party. We can teach religion in school. (We will still be covering other people’s beliefs and holidays, but we get to celebrate our own without apology.) We like to be our own bosses.

3. Academics: Sylvan Learning Center has a guarantee that your child will advance one full grade level after 36 hours of instruction in a particular subject. When I worked there, the average was more like 1.8 grade levels. There were many things that made this happen. The great program that targeted each student’s specific weaknesses was part of it. One-on-one attention was another part of it. With homeschooling we can do both of those. We don’t have to go at the average rate of the class, but can tailor our curriculum to the specific needs of our children. We can go faster on some topics and slower on others. They won’t be in a class of 25-35, but in a house with just a couple of other students (their siblings), each working at their own level. There is no way they’ll get lost in the system.

4. School can be interesting: Our children can study anything that interests them (provided they cover the essentials). In preschool, Esther did a unit on princesses. We had great fun learning about real and fairy-tale princesses. Right now she can’t get enough about flowers, so we’re covering them in science. Nothing can hold us back. If we want to learn astronomy, Latin, or anything else, the choice is ours.

5. Socialization: Many homeschoolers call this the “s” word. It seems to be the number one fear of non-homeschoolers that homeschooled kids won’t get any opportunity to learn social skills. This might be true of a homeschool family that locked themselves in their house and never emerged, but that’s not us, nor is it the norm. School isn’t the perfect place to learn social skills anyway. First – how often did you hear your teachers say, “School is not for socializing!”? Second – in school, kids are in a class of other kids who are all the exact same age, and all live within the same few square miles of each other. That means that the majority of them have all the same race, religion, and economic status. When does that happen in real life? To get social skills we can enroll our children in team sports, scouting programs, dance, clubs, and volunteer opportunities. We can make sure they have situations where they need to be comfortable with people who are different from themselves, who are various ages and from various backgrounds. They will also have a strong sense of who they are, because they’ll spend plenty of time with their own family. In our humble opinion, socializing starts in the home.

6. Time: School doesn’t take up as much time when you don’t have to call roll, line up a dozen times, quiet the class down a score of times, hand back papers, turn in papers, divide into groups, and all the other stuff a school has to do to keep organized. I remember particularly my high school statistics class. Math was easy for me, so I usually finished my work with plenty of time to spare. I would sit and stare at my teacher, just to annoy her, and because I had nothing better to do. The law said I had to be in that seat for another 13.5 minutes, or the class was somehow invalid. I also remember all the movies we watched at the end of the year because the teachers had to keep us in class, but they knew they couldn’t get us to do any real work. There will be none of that with homeschool. Most homeschoolers I’ve talked to who are in the thick of things do school about four to six hours a day, four days a week. The rest of the time they can use for whatever they want (like weekly field trips). We won’t need to just fill time, we can use it.

We have many more reasons too, but I think you get the idea. We don’t know what the future holds for us. We might just homeschool this one year, or we might homeschool all of our children through high school. We’ll take it one year and one child at a time. But for now, this is what we’re doing, and we’re very excited about it.

Here are some answers to a few common questions:

1. Do homeschoolers miss out on school stuff? Not really. There are homeschool proms and graduations, bands, drama clubs, and just about everything else. I guess they’ll miss out on seeing middle school kids making-out in the hallways, but I think they’ll survive without that.

2. Can homeschoolers go to college? Absolutely. Macomb Community College takes homeschoolers at age 14! Ivy league colleges LOVE homeschoolers and have special scholarships just for them.

3. How do you teach something you don’t know? I either learn along with my child (there are a lot of great curriculum for homeschool parents), or outsource to a tutor if it’s really advanced. In elementary school I’m pretty sure I can keep up with the kids. We’ll probably be outsourcing a lot if we homeschool through high school.

4. How do you teach more than one child? We do math and reading individually, but things like history and science we can combine, with the older children having slightly more advanced work than the younger ones.

5. Do you ever get time to yourself? YES! Right now kindergarten takes us about an hour a day. That’ll probably go up to two hours in the next month or two as we add on more than just the basics. Most homeschool curriculum is designed to teach independent work gradually, so that by the fifth or sixth grade a child is self-teaching. I’ll certainly be involved with them, and check up on their progress frequently, but they can do most of their work independently. Having that skill will come in handy when they go to college.

p.s. We are not anti-public school. We can still be your friends if you're not homeschoolers. :)