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.
The kids spent three years in government school. We sent them there because homeschool preparation and delivery were just to difficult to do using the methods described in The Well Trained Mind books on which we based our first homeschool year. The problem was compounded because the principle planner/preparer/teacher/correcter (me) worked full time. Lorena did a lot of work to make the homeschool possible, but I was in charge of content and I just could not get it all done and keep my day job.
During the spring of the school year before we started government school, a juvenile group home moved into the house next to us. The new next door occupants were in continuous uproar. We actually did not feel like it was safe for our kids, so we put our house on the market and got out of there. The good news about the move was that we moved from a very low performing school district to one of the highest performing school districts in the state. I was in a job that required a lot of travel, literally around the world, so we knew we had to do something different. We investigated the school our children would attend, talked to the teachers they were assigned and decided to enroll them.
The kids started school and it was really not so bad. They made a few friends, enjoyed participation in their school’s annual fund raising carnivals and a school play or two and that sort of thing. The problem was that virtually nothing they did seemed to rise to the level of actual education. The first clue we got about that was when Lorena went into the classroom as a volunteer aide. Kelly was a good reader by the time she entered the school, but it seemed like none of the other parents had spent time trying to get their kids up the reading curve. Lorena spent all her time as an aide in Kelly’s classroom listening to other kids read while Kelly sat in the corner and read books like Nancy Drew, Hank the Cowdog and other books around those levels of difficulty. That kind of thing did not happen all the time, but it did happen more than it didn’t.
Christian’s experience was very similar. He was very competent with books like Junie B. Jones, but none of the other kids were doing much more than memorize the alphabet and say the letter sounds. Lorena spent her time as an aide in Christian’s classroom helping the kids learn how to pick up toys, color, do crafts and act properly in a classroom setting. I know there were plenty of kids out there operating at our kids level, but it did not seem like any of them were assigned to classes with Kelly or Christian. To us, this seemed to say less about how bright were the kids–many of them were very bright–than it did about how serious the parents felt about their responsibility to take ownership of their children’s education.
We were not too worried about it at the time. We continued to do educational stuff at home–reading, writing, arithmetic, memorization, music and everything else we could think to do. The kid’s academic education did not stop during their government school years, it just did not happen in the government school. I guess we were doing what has come to be known as “after-schooling” which is the equivalent of homeschooling, but that happens after the traditional school has babysat the kids for a few hours.
Betty Blonde #223 – 05/25/2009
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