It was an interesting juxtaposition yesterday when I received an email from a homeschooling mother about the push-back she received from Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina when she tried to enroll her 14 year old child into some classes there. We ran into the same flavor of push-back from Wake Tech when we tried to enroll our son Christian there under very similar circumstances. That interaction was well documented here on the is blog. Click here for a description of that particular part of the story. That email was ironic because, a few minutes before I read it, I was on the phone with Christian, now 22, who was sitting in an airport in New York waiting to catch a flight to Boston to make a presentation on his PhD dissertation topic to the people who fund his research at MIT.
Both our kids were extremely well served by Wake Tech. Both of the kids finished hard, math focused STEM degrees at the undergraduate level with honors, had multiple funded graduate school opportunities at least partially because of their college start at Wake Tech. They functioned well socially and academically at Wake Tech and they went there without adult supervision. We attribute their success from a social standpoint to the fact that they were not socialized in a traditional school cocoon and were able to interact effectively across a broad range of age groups and social backgrounds because of their homeschool socialization.
None of this had to do with any special abilities of our kids. They are/were of normal intelligence and academic gifts, but they excelled because they were in the kinds of environments provided by both homeschool and Wake Tech. It would seem like Wake Tech would want to do more of that sort of thing than less. I hope that I can help promote this if I ever have the opportunity to do so, either with Wake Tech or any other such excellent community college that will listen.
You can read about how we homeschooled by clicking here and how both the kids skipped high school by clicking here.