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Notes from a homeschooling mom: Why we started
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My homeschooled kids, photo by A.Hermitt (me)
Probably more odd than a homeschooling mom writing about education in general is the fact that I have nothing against public education. In fact, I believe that some children thrive quite well in public schools, and many even excell. Still I have opted to homeschool my children. I have my reasons.
For us it is very personal. Many years ago, when my first child was born, my husband came home from work very excited about a co-worker who was homeschooling his children. He told me all about it with the wide-eyed excitement of a four year old who had been given a bag of candy. I on the other hand was not enthused, or even intrigued by the revelation. It made me quite mad. With all of the post-partum hormone ridden energy I could muss, I shut down the possibility and probably taught my husband a few very vile words in the process. How dare he suggest such a thing when I was struggling with a newborn, and doing it very much alone. Based on his travel schedule and his ideas about how we would educate our child, at the time it seemed he planned on locking away my shoes and filling our home with kids that I would spend every minute of the rest of my life with.
While I had single-handedly squashed my husbands hope of a unique education for our children, he had still manged to plant a seed. This seed would grow over the years and would occasionally get watered whenever I felt that my kids needs were not getting met in a traditional education setting. The first watering came from the realization of communication issues between parents and teachers. Every time I saw my child's 3 year old pre-school teacher in his private preschool, I would ask, "How is Jackson doing?". She would reply. "He's doing fine. He's just Jackson." While I thought that was an odd response, I let it go. I knew he had a strong personality for a little guy so I thought that was what he was talking about. After a few months, I was called in for a conference with the teacher. She informed me that I should consider taking him out of preschool, and trying again in a few month. When I asked why she responded, "well, you know he can't speak".
I stared at her for a minute with my mouth agape, trying to make sense out of what she had just said. One of us was obviously nuts, and it couldn't be me. Still the words she was saying made no sense. As if on cue, my son proved my point. Just at that moment, he started yelling at his baby sister who was trying to shove the classroom blocks in her mouth. In clear, well annunciated words he yelled. "No Jordan, that's dirty!". The teacher then jumped up as if a miraculous healing had occured and ran over to where he stood. She got on her knees and hugged him exclaiming. "He can speak!, He can speak!" She really had no idea he could speak, and had never in about 4 months mentioned it to me! I had little to say at that moment. I packed up my kids and went home and when I had cooled off, I invited her to my home on a Saturday so that she could observe my son in his own environment. She found out that not only could he speak, but that he had a full vocabulary, and could work a computer that still required dos prompts. He finished the school year with no problems.
Something of that nature happened every single year with one child or the other. I would start the school year explaining my children's personality, only to find out later that the teacher was not listening. It would always take a few months into the school year before the teacher would build a rapport with my child and frustrations would cease. For many, this is a natural rhythm that students and teachers go through, and it sets them up for the natural course of life. People, come, people go, people adjust. For others, it is a huge distraction from the educational process, especially for shy or rambunctious kids, and this is why so many schools are moving teachers up along with the promoted students to the next grade.
I hit my final level of frustration when for the second year in a row, teachers insisted that my mildly hyperactive daughter needed ritalin. I disagreed to the point that the seed planted long ago when my husband brought home the crazy idea of homeschooling bloomed into a brilliant flower and I began researching the prospect of homeschooling. When I finally came to terms with the idea, my husband did the most pitiful, I-told-you-so dance I had ever seen.
The choice to homeschool for the majority of parents, I believe are just as personal as my own. While the decision was fueled very much by my personal impatience with the settling in process every school year, and also a very personal issue with wasting time (due to many close family members dying at a young age, but that's a different story for another time), I still believe in public education. I just felt that for my children, there had to be a better way to educate them without all of the ups and downs of getting used to a new teacher every year. In addition to that, I felt that my son was advanced (we had been told so in previous schools) but the school he was in was not willing to work with him. Pair that with the ritalin issue, andI had lost all patience. It was time to try something different.
It was time to homeschool.
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