Day 4: My Second Impression of Homeschooling

I have worked in the food and beverage industry for most of my life and even while I was working in the public school system, I continued working in a restaurant as a server, a bartender, a hostess, and a manager-on-duty.  I did this because I found that working in the school system with my position of an Educational Technician was unstable - there was no pay for vacations nor holidays, we were not allowed to contribute to the decisions made for the student's education, and there was no job security as when a student that we were assigned to graduated or was no longer attending school, we were sent home.  I was also working in the school system at a time when I was able to see the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act and how special education students were forced out of the Life Skills programs and into mainstream classrooms.  On a daily basis I watched teachers, students, and parents struggling to make the changes required to satisfy this law and it never worked - everyone was beyond stressed and this created an emotionally charged environment.

For me, the end point is when I was working with two students - one was graduating that year and the other would be graduating the next - and because my main student, the one who was graduating, made it to graduation and left school, the administration pulled me out of my one-on-one work with the second student who actually needed my support more than my first student.  When they called me to take on a new student for the following year, I declined and instead of going back, I decided to go into managing a restaurant that I had been working in for some time.

During my second year of managing the restaurant, I had a 20-year old girl on my staff that was working on her Masters degree.  When she was not at work, she was focused on her education and her future so she wasn't into the same social activities that the other staff were into.  I remember her being bright, cheery, really pleasant to be with, and up for challenges.  She was also able to fit in with the other staff despite her outside interests and activities being different.  When she told me that she was homeschooled, I became excited because I had been curious about homeschooling and homeschoolers and this is something that I wondered if it would be possible for me to do for my youngest child, Hunter.  She worked for me for two years and it was great getting to know her, learning about the homeschooling process, and seeing how someone who was homeschooled interacted with others and their environment.  See, there's this myth that homeschooled kids aren't 'socialized' or aren't able to function with stability within the system and I found out from this girl in real time that this definitely was not true.

Working and playing - a daily thing in our restaurant

During her second year with us, her mom came to work for our company at the front desk of the hotel so I utilized the many times that I had with her in one-on-one communication to ask questions about homeschooling laws, requirements, procedures, the time investment, curriculum and what I could potentially expect to see based on her own experiences with homeschooling her children.  See, homeschooling tends to look like this HUGE thing - like this big deal or a commitment that goes beyond what we think we can give to our children but this mom assisted me to see that it's actually quite simple and more convenient for some parent's schedules.

Out of all of this, though, what stuck with me the most is when the mom shared with me that by the time children are 8 years old, they start teaching themselves.  She told me that the only part I am actually required to provide are the 'morals' or principles.

To be continued.

Day 3: School Won't Change Who Your Child Is (And Neither Will You)

In my last post, Day 2: School From A Parent's Perspective, I left off with when I realized that my oldest child was not academically prepared to be successful in a private high school environment because my child had limited exposure to text books in her elementary school and the high school expected that a student be responsible for answering their own questions about the material by utilizing and researching the information provided in the text books.

There was a small part of me that blamed the elementary school for not providing books for the students and thus showing them how to use books to find information and self-educate. This is in-part due to me seeing throughout the years how well paid the teachers were as they drove really nice cars and lived in beautiful houses.  So this point of children not being provided with the same educational resources that I had during my education process was confusing and I often wondered why the teachers had so much more and the students had so much more less.  And though I was in-part in blame back then, I now have an understanding of how our system currently works where resources are not equally shared so within this, for the few to have a high-quality life, many others must go without.  It is the same in the public school systems and the children being the one's to go without is an unfortunate consequence of our acceptance and allowance of this system. Which brings me to my next point: My known responsibility as a parent.

My two children - one 7, one 25

Regardless of my attempts to blame the school system for my child not being educated to a private high school standard as well as my own, I knew that I was the one that was ultimately responsible for her not succeeding.  I was the one that gave up, I was the one that accepted the authority of the system, and I was the one that very much wanted to believe and have faith that the situation with my child's education would work itself out.  I'm sure that many can relate with the guilt here - the knowing that you could have done something to change the situation, decided not to, and then saw that consequences of that decision.  Admittedly, I carried around that guilt for a long time and to some extent, that guilt influenced my decision to homeschool my youngest child and to give him the quality education that I saw my oldest child missing out on.  Looking back, I see that despite my attempts to utilize guilt to victimize myself and trying to continue to give up, my sense of responsibility for the lives I brought into this world was much stronger and later I was able to utilize this guilt as a point of making changes.

I took this picture of my oldest in her study hall.
I was fortunate to be able to be a part of her high school years.

So, at the time that my oldest child was frustrated with the private high school, I was working as an Educational Technician at a public high school and I saw that it would be cool for us to be there together. My daughter agreed and joined me during her junior and senior years.  She says today that it's one of the best decisions that she made.  From a parent's perspective, I agree as it was definitely cool to see her relax, have fun, enjoy the education that she WAS prepared for and focus on art, theater, and being social which were things that were important to her.


Understand, my oldest child grew into an adult that is stable, responsible, committed and has a strong work ethic.  Private school would not have made her more successful and public school did not hold her back from being successful because she is an individual that sees clearly what she wants for herself and comes up with plans for potential ways to make these things happen.

For parents and future parents reading this, realize that the school that you are able to provide for your child - whether it's private, public, charter, co-op, or homeschool - is not likely to change who your child is.  What I have found that changes with the child in response to where they get their education is their beliefs and perceptions about self, others, and the world and how they automatically respond to what they're seeing with their beliefs. This is a point that I see surfacing quite often so we'll go deeper into this as the blog progresses.

With her husband.
They met in their second grade classroom.

Day 2: School From A Parent's Perspective

Referring to my last blog post, Day 1: My First Impression of Homeschooling, I mentioned that I am the parent of two children.  My first was born in 1989 and my second in 2007.

With my first child, I was very young and had the tendency to place faith and hope into the world systems - especially the education system because I had a certain level of respect for the education that I received.  Also, I gave birth to my child when I was still in high school and shortly after graduating, I went to college. So, the system education experience was something that was still apart of my daily living and I saw it as having a great amount of value and being an integral part of a child's development.

Early on, I found that my child was extremely mentally and physically active and that she responded well when being directed to reading, math, art, and other educational-type activities so I integrated those things into her daily schedule.  As a result of this, at age 2 1/2, she was able to get an early acceptance at a private pre-school.  She thrived in this environment - she thoroughly enjoyed going to school and it was very cool to see her develop socially.  Throughout this, we continued with her education at home because it was something fun that we did together and it kept us both routine, scheduled, and focused.

When she was 5, she started kindergarten - it was a half-day program and I saw it as a way of integrating the children into the school experience.  So that first year, I didn't see much academic progress but I didn't anticipate seeing much either.

My daughter at age 5 - just before entering school for her first day of kindergarten.

For the following year, she began the first grade and I expected that I would start to see her being challenged academically.  Each day I saw the work that she brought home and it was the same as what she had brought home from her half-days of kindergarten.  When I asked her what she learned, she would smile, shrug, and and usually say, "Nothing."  After a couple of months of this, I called the school, expressed my concern about my child not learning anything new, and asked if they would consider challenging her.  I was told, "She is fine and she is right where she needs to be."  As I've mentioned, I still had this belief that the school knew better than I did, so I let it go.

Throughout the years, this pattern continued of me being concerned that she wasn't learning anything and with me doing nothing about it because I saw the school system as an authority - and after awhile, I accepted that my child was an 'average student' because she wasn't particularly driven to take advanced classes and seemed relatively satisfied with her school experience.

I do remember this one time when there was conflict in her classroom for an extensive period of time.  The school was struggling to direct the situation and they were reacting to what was happening with and between the children in her class so she would come home stressed and burnt-out.  She told me that she wanted to be homeschooled - but with my job, the other things going on, and me thinking that I wasn't qualified to teach her, I told her that it wasn't possible.

The school eventually fixed the problem and the point of homeschooling never came up again.  She went on to attend the same private college prep school that I attended.

See, I saw my daughter as much more intelligent than I ever was - she did not have the problems that I had with learning and she seemed to breeze through school up until high school level.  So, I thought that she would do really well at this school.  I mean, if I could make it through it, she would probably do pretty well there.  I also was satisfied that she chose this school because I knew that she would be challenged.

During her first year of high school it became clear that she hadn't been prepared for this level of education.  I remember a day when I picked her up from school, she was agitated at an experience that she had with one of her teachers where she asked her teacher a question and the teacher told her to look it up in her book.  She then explained to her teacher that she didn't know how to look something up in a book and her teacher suggested that she learn.

When she told me this, I recalled how I never once saw her bring home a book from school until high school - it was always copied worksheets.  She had never learned how to use a table of contents or the index of a text book.

To be continued.

Day 1: My First Impression of Homeschooling

As a teenager, I had my first look at homeschooling when I went with a friend of mine to her home where her young sister was homeschooling.  I remember seeing her sister doing schoolwork at the dining room table while the mother looked on from where she was doing tasks in the kitchen.

Seeing that it was during a time when most children her age were in school, I asked, "What is she doing at home? Is she sick?" And they answered, "No, she does her schoolwork at home - she is homeschooled."  At the time, I did not realize that such a thing was possible unless there was something mentally or physically wrong with a child.  I remember being curious about what might be wrong with the child and I secretly asked myself questions: Does she not get along with the other children?  Did she fail at school and now needs her mother to catch her up?  Are her parents trying to protect her from something?  Is she mentally disabled?  Is she in a wheelchair? Does she have some sort of disease?

During the short time that I was in my friend's home that day, I could not find anything wrong about the child.  However, what I did see was a relaxed young person who was mature, articulate and an active participant in the conversations that were taking place.

When my friend noticed that her sister was getting distracted, she said that it was time for us to go, we said our good-bye's and left promptly.

I remember continuing to be curious about homeschooling because it seemed weird or foreign to me so I would ask my friend random questions like, "Why does she do her schoolwork at home?" and,"Why can't she be with other kids?"

My friend answered simply that her sister didn't want to go to school, that she didn't really like the kids that she had gone to school with and that she got more work done at home than in school.  Also, her mom was a stay-home-mother so it wasn't a problem for the family to do this.  My friend told me that she, herself, was also homeschooled up to high school level.   I found this interesting because of how my friend was - she was more mature than any of us at this age, she didn't have the emotional ups-and-downs, she was relaxed, she didn't seem to be influenced much about what others were saying or might be thinking in regards to her or her decisions, she was committed, and all-in-all a really nice, easy-going and down-to-earth person.

So this was my first impression of homeschooling.  At the time, the general belief that I had connected to this way of educating was that homeschooling was one of those rare things that others do - that it was a radical and sort of 'on the fringe of society' thing.  Also, I grew up in a period of time and within a family where being a stay-at-home mom was looked down on - where I saw that being a housewife was a horrible life choice and that it was wrong to not be out in the world and contributing to society by working.

I admit, I did not see the point of homeschooling.  I saw the school system as respectable, experts, and absolutely necessary for almost every child.  So, I had this belief that all children that are able should be in school and that all parents should be using that time as an opportunity to work and contribute.

When my first child entered first grade of the public school system, my perspective changed where I began to question what was going on at school and why my child wasn't learning anything new because she wasn't bringing home any work that I saw as challenging or further developing any skills that we had already opened up at home.

In the next blog, I will be expanding on that experience of not being satisfied with my child's education and sharing what changed my perspective on the school system and why, despite my awareness that public school may not be best for my child, I chose to continue to allow them to fulfill the educator role for her.  I will also be sharing how this history assisted me with making the decision to take responsibility for my second child's education with homeschooling.

My second child, Hunter, whose school is home, the world, and the things that interest him or are important to him.  In the background, you can see where does his structured curriculum like Reading and Math - on a TV table and sitting on a comfy couch with a blanket, his favorite toy Mario, and his Nintendo 3DS.

Introduction

Homeschooling is becoming a more and more accepted way in the United States for parents to take responsibility for their children's education.

Each parent has their own reasons for why they have decided to homeschool - it could be religious beliefs, not wanting another to raise their children, bad experiences with the school system, impracticality of school day hours, not agreeing with public school curriculum, not trusting the school system, not wanting any institution to have control of the parents or their children, they are doing it for fun, they want to be a part of their child's learning process, or they simply want to provide a one-on-one education for their children.

Most parents homeschool in a way that differs from the next parent.  In our state, the state of Maine, the law requires that students learn specific subjects each year. However, how we do it, when we do it, and what materials we decide to use to teach the child these subjects is entirely up to us.

Many of our homeschool days are simply being together, being silly, and having fun.

Homeschooling is growing and because there are so many parents that are homeschooling, we have this community of individuals for support, cross-referencing, information, and sharing solutions with each other.  So,  even though we're educating in a way that works for us as individuals, there are many opportunities for us to come together as a group where personal history, beliefs, and economic status are irrelevant as our primary focus is on our children and providing the best possible education for them.  

Homeschooled kids in our area coming together for a field trip.  We also have a regular group of us that meet up every Wednesday.

This is cool considering that a few years ago only a few were homeschooling and the general perspective on homeschooling was that it was 'wrong' or that it denied children in some way or another - and now, as we are becoming aware of just how much our school systems are diminishing, there is an overall agreement in our society that homeschooling is a perfectly acceptable solution.

In this Homeschoolers Journey To Life blog, I will be discussing these points mentioned here in expanded detail, going into the myths and realities that I have found in regards to homeschooling, sharing research and relevant information, and also using this blog as self-support for myself as I stand and investigate what comes up in this journey and look at ways of educating and parenting that can be integrated into my day-to-day living that expresses my utmost potential.