This post is part of a narrative history of our homeschool. It is about why we chose to homeschool, what we did and how we did it. It is about our failures and frustrations as well as our successes. The plan is to make an honest accounting of it all for the benefit of ourselves and others. This is a work in progress which was started in late October 2014 after the kids had already skipped most or all of high school, Christian had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude), Kelly had earned a Bachelors degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) and they were ensconced in funded PhD programs on the West Coast. I add to the narrative as I have time.
I have decided to try to write a narrative history of our homeschool. My kids suggested that I write a book about what we did, not so much because we had anything particularly important to say, but as a way to remember and pass along a little family history. I have thought about this and even written about it in this blog. My conclusion is that I do not have the time at this point in my life nor discipline required to make an overall plan for something as ambitious as a book.
We do get lots of questions from friends, family and readers of the blog. I try to answer them as best I can, but I believe a continuous narrative might be a bigger help than just the hit and miss blog posts we have on this website. I have tried to pull some of the stuff together into series which I think have been a help to, actually, quite a few people. The series on skipping high school, use of CLEP testing in a homeschool setting, and socialization rank fairly high on the search engines and we get many visits there.
After a couple of false starts and the realization I do not currently have the will, time nor discipline to write a book, I kind of gave up on the project. Yesterday, though, it dawned on me that I have been faithfully writing a blog now for over ten years. All this writing has never been about any monetary benefit we might receive from it, so why not just record the history here. The story might lack in structure to a certain extent, but at least I can get the narrative down. That is what I have decided to try to do. I am sure it will be like all of my blogging effort–there will be periods of activity followed by times when my day job requires my full focus.
I am not quite sure about the structure yet, but the preliminary plan is to start writing about what led up to our decision to homeschool the kids. Soon after I get started, I will write a contents section and provide a link to a table of contents page for the whole narrative so not too much clicking back and forth is required to read the whole thing. If I ever get through the whole narrative, I will probably put it all into a PDF document or something similar so it can be downloaded all at once.
As for now, this is still in the experimental stage, so the whole project will surely morph a little before I settle on a format and/or writing schedule. I hope to keep posting on other things that interest me as I go along, too.
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Betty Blonde #195 – 04/15/2009
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