When a homeschooled kid asks to go to school...

I was talking with some other homeschooling moms this afternoon. One mom has homeschooled all of her children but also sent each of them to school for a while; she explained sending them to school because they asked to go. This isn't the first time I've heard of parents doing that, but I just don't get it.



When my oldest was about 6 years old, he begged for days to get to go to school "like the other kids." My husband and I had decided, for a multitude of reasons--including how terrible the local schools are, that we did not want to send our children to school as long as we had any other choice. And this isn't the sort of thing where a child gets a vote--at least not in our family. But that doesn't mean that we don't listen to our children. Rather, I spent time trying to get down to the nitty-gritty of why he was asking to go to school. I finally got him to admit that he really, really wanted to ride a school bus.



Once I figured out the reason behind his request, we were able to deal with it. I explained to him that we live so close to the nearest elementary school that they wouldn't let him ride a bus; he'd have to walk if he went to school. And then I took care of his real desire: We took a bus trip.



We walked to a public bus stop and got on public transportation. I chose a destination that involved having to transfer to another bus, with a long wait in the hot Florida sun, and when he complained about the wait and the heat and the noise on the bus that made it hard to hear each other, I cheerfully said, "But this is all part of riding a bus." Later, we talked about the kids who do ride a bus to school and have to wait for it in the heat, the cold, the rain, and whatever other weather comes their way. The kids who have to get up early every morning and gulp down their breakfast to get out to the bus stop in time, while we get to enjoy a leisurely morning routine, watching cartoons before Dad leaves for work, doing lessons in the family room (or on the patio, or in the car, or wherever we feel like it), having a snack when needed, getting to go on lots more field trips, being able to stay in if the weather is lousy, and so on.



The requests to go to school faded away....

Homeschooling--Our beginning and the socialization question

Before our first child was born, we decided to homeschool. I researched local laws and found that our state statutes were more readable than I had imagined. I found homeschool support groups online and lurked for a while. At the local library, I found more books than I had imagined on homeschooling--everything from catalogs of resources to books on reasons for homeschooling to a wide variety of methods of homeschooling. I downloaded lists of skills children should learn at various grade levels. I did all the sorts of things that many families who are considering homeschooling do.

Unlike a lot of families making this decision, we weren't complete novices when it came to educating our own. I was a classroom teacher with vast amounts of experience in private and public schools. My spouse was (and still is) a public school teacher. But more importantly, I'd been homeschooled myself for a couple of years several decades ago, before anyone had coined the term "homeschooling." So, we weren't trying to decide whether we really wanted to homeschool; rather I was researching how we would do it.

The big surprise to us was the negative attitude of my mom. My mom who had homeschooled me didn't like the idea of us homeschooling our own. How could this be?

Slowly it dawned on me that she was what I've heard called a "reluctant homeschooler." She hadn't homeschooled my sister and I out of a passion for teaching her own. Rather, she'd tried her very best to get a qualified teacher to teach us while we traveled the world on the yacht my dad built. She found a couple who were willing to live on board and travel with us; the man would help sail the boat while his wife, the certified teacher, would teach me the lessons in the correspondence curriculum that my parents had bought. The only problem with the plan was that the teacher never got around to teaching anything. Eventually, out of desperation, my mom decided to teach me. She figured that she, with just a high school diploma, could surely do a better job than someone who never even tried. But it was not the way that she would have chosen if she'd had any other choice.

What mom didn't realize was that she'd done a great job. Okay, a certified teacher would have cringed at her methods. But you know what? They worked. They would never have worked in a classroom with 25 students, but at home they worked well. Which is one of the great aspects of homeschooling. The one-on-one nature of homeschooling means that parents don't need to know proper teaching techniques.

Her method? She'd hand second grade me a packet of lessons for the week and tell me to go do the first day's lessons and come find her if I had any questions. I had to learn to read the directions for myself and then do the work. She'd check it and answer questions if I had any. I learned how to learn mostly on my own. I learned to manage my time well, since once I did the packet of work correctly, I could play. These are valuable life skills.

Mom was worried that our kids wouldn't get proper socialization. And she didn't see why we'd bother homeschooling since we didn't have to; we weren't gallivanting around the world. But she didn't understand that she'd given me a great gift in homeschooling me. She didn't know what I saw daily in the current public schools (the low educational standards, the bullying that administrators wouldn't stop, the violence, the wasted time, the high levels of nasty peer pressure, etc.) nor what I'd seen in private schools (parents and children who felt their money bought them good grades, drugs and other problems swept under the carpet to avoid losing tuition dollars, administrators who sacrificed teachers rather than have upset parents, etc.).

We knew we were homeschooling. We just had to figure out how to win Mom over. And make sure that no other friends or relatives had similar outlooks. I'd read too many stories of homeschoolers who ended up in trouble because some caring relative thought they were helping the children by causing trouble, and we didn't want to go there.

Our solution? Create a family newsletter. A few times a year, we typed it up on the computer, pasted on pictures of the children, and wrote articles about what we were doing at home. About the field trips we went on. The fun we had at homeschool support group meetings and events. The books we were reading as a family. The friends the children had. The sports and other events the children were involved in. The things they were learning. We hoped that if we bragged enough about what we were doing, let loved ones know that the children were learning a lot, had friends, were out and about with other people, were experiencing more than they'd ever experience in a modern school settings, then our loved ones would support us in this homeschooling endeavor--even if they'd never choose to homeschool their own.