Day 309 of 1000

We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Albany public school system.  We had such a bad experience with them that we were forced back into homeschool and we are very grateful to them for that.  A recent comment on our blog (you can find it here) from a couple considering homeschool in South Korea brought back those memories.  We did not really want or plan to homeschool, but we were forced into it.  It was one of the best things that happened to our little family.  We like to think we did our homeschool differently than other homeschoolers, but I think that is true for virtually all people who homeschool.  All we know is that after eight years of homeschool, we count it a major blessing that we were able to spend a dramatically greater amount of time with our children than would have been possible in any traditional school setting.

It has dawned on me that maybe it is good naratives that encourage and inspire others to find the thing that works well for the own families.  We do not have any illusion that what worked for us is the best thing for other people, too, but we are humbled and grateful that what we did worked for us.  The funny thing is that it was probably more important to our children that we were totally invested in finding the best way possible to educate them than the actual methods that we used.  They saw what was important to us and they embraced it because they knew we were doing it for them.

It is awesome to see that other people are thinking the same way we thought.  They will all do it very differently than us, but the doing is more important than the method.  What a gift it is to us when others read our narrative and are encouraged.