I do not often come out much about the fact that we homeschool because a) it's really no one's business that we do; and 2) see #1. I know, that's not nice, but sadly, it's the truth. We made the decision to homeschool our daughter while I was still pregnant with her. We felt all along very strongly that we, her parents, are more qualified to teach our child than someone that's never met her, spent years in a liberal college being spoon fed liberal agenda after liberal mindset, and ultimately would be charged with force-feeding Common Core to our daughter. It just wasn't happening.
I have an older daughter, Katherine. I homeschooled Katherine for third and fourth grades. It was while she was in kindergarten that we got that dreaded phone call back in about 1996-1997 that, well, she was exhibiting traits associated with ADD and we need to sit down with you and come up with a solution for your daughter. So, dutifully we attended a meeting with the teacher, the school counselor, the principal, and a slew of other people and it was decided that her education would be based on a little pink pill: Ritalin. Daily she had to run down to the office to be handed her little pink pill that, in the end, didn't do diddly squat for her and was the begin of her journey down the road of educational ruin.
It wasn't until I parent-helped in her classroom one day in Second Grade that I saw just how big a trainwreck this medication and mindset made our daughter. I wasn't allowed to give her one-on-one help, so we did a group setting with a bunch of the kids, and it was horrifying. Like trying to herd cats. Her desk was like nuclear winter--a disaster. She was nearing the end of her second grade year and she couldn't read, write her name, no organizational skills whatsoever, couldn't add or subtract the simplest of problems. We got her tonsils out, made the decision to pull her out of school after second grade and home school her. The day of parent-teacher conferences I informed her teacher, Mrs. Christy, that we would be homeschooling her the next year. Mrs. Christy went off-the-charts nuclear on me, and we ended up standing literally nose-to-nose yelling at each other. I was, in her opinion, not qualified to meet the educational needs of my own daughter. Like she was a shining example of educational heroics. The last day of school we ceremoniously flushed the Ritalin down the toilet and thus began the dismantling of my daughter's public school brain. By November of that year, three months into third grade, she was reading well, writing well, and had mastered long division. It was hard work but definitely worth it.
Today we homeschool Alison and we are ending Ali's fourth grade year by the time June rolls around. I have tailored homeschooling to her abilities. That's one of the wonderful things about homeschooling. You don't spend countless hours a day trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. My daughter wakes up long after the kids in the block have trudged to the bus stop in all kinds of weather. She isn't dragging a backpack and countless other items with her onto a bus. She wakes up when she's rested, we take our time getting going. School first thing in the morning doesn't work for any of us so we begin usually around 1:00 in the afternoon and finish somewhere around 4:00. Three hours? Yes, we get more done in three hours than most public school kids get done in 6-8. I don't have to spend 1/3 of the day disciplining her to get her to pay attention. We cover all the necessary subjects, yet not in traditional ways. She can spend hours out in the backyard examining everything there and then comes in and researches on the Internet the habitats of ladybugs or how slugs crawl or how vegetation grows. She loves shows on NatGeo Wild, Discovery Channel--any channel that examines anything with biology, science, animals, dinosaurs, how-it's-made, A Baby Story, The Incredible Dr. Pol, and too many more to mention. She absorbs knowledge like a sponge. She can tell me more about dinosaurs than most college paleontologist students can. Sea life? Ask her. Horses? Ask her. Animals in general? Ask her. The human body? She can find it out for you. We work on math and I've been able to help her with her problem areas. We discovered early on she's dyslexic. Mildly, but enough to cause problems from time to time. She's a very
visual learner so I invested in Hooked on Phonics. The interactive graphics and repetitive nature of the lessons had her reading in no time and today she reads at a high school level. The child is RARELY without at least one book in her hands. She's not one to sit through happily through book learning, manual after manual, page after page. It's boring and she's going to let her mind drift. So, being artistic and a self-starter, after watching me write a book, she's writing her own. She's doing the entire thing herself, drawing all the photos and typing, painstakingly, all of the story on Word on the laptop. Her english lesson will be editing the book. Crafting complete sentences, proper punctuation, proper grammer. It will be a phenomenal way to get hand-on learning for english class. Again, we structure learning so that she's learning ALL DAY LONG in everything she does, not just for a set amount of hours in a government structured school room.
Socialization? What about it? I'd rather she get her socializing at church with the other kids, or other homeschool kids through local coops or homeschool groups. They are some of the most fun, imaginative, adventurous kids you will ever meet because they aren't told how to think. They learn through DOING and seeking, not being told what to know. There's plenty of socializing. In fact, if you aren't careful, you can almost overdo it. Bullying isn't a problem because she's taught how to treat people with respect. Open the Bible and find what God says about how you treat people, then treat them just as He instructs. Success! Sex education is something we discuss bit by bit, not dumping concepts and facts on her when she's mentally unprepared to handle them. And we can teach her about it through the prism of the Bible, where sex was designed to be between a man and a woman inside the boundaries of marriage. Not on a Girls Gone Wild video that will haunt her the rest of her life, or through a gay pride parade where all forms of lewd and disgusting behavior are flaunted.
Homeschooling works for us as a family. We are all three around each other every single day with daddy being home because of his medical problems. Not many kids get the chance to really have great relationships with mom and dad because of the long time spent away from each other during the day when parents are working and the child is in school. I will admit there are some days it's harder than others. Sometimes a break is needed. However, when Mike was going through wound care for his leg after the nec/fac, Alison was privy to a world not many kids get to see. A world of people receiving chemo and other treatments for cancer, or dealing with life-threatening medical issues. She learned empathy for her fellow man. She learned to respect people by helping them. Holding open a door, steadying a shaky patient with her hand. Being kind and quiet, not loud and obnoxious. She learned that not everyone has a rosy life, some people live a very hard life, but they need love and respect as much if not more than other people. She's learned to have a wonderful servant's heart by helping her dad. She's learning a lot about running a household and things like cooking and sewing and doing for your family and home on a budget. Hopefully, she can learn to be a Proverbs 31 woman long before I did.
She's enjoying a movie right now. Then we will will start school. Focus on math and english today, and then she can take her penmanship into her room and work on it and then read two history books on Abe Lincoln. She will finish her day with her youth group at Kids On The Rock learning about Jesus. It's all perfectly homeschooled, perfectly fit for us, perfectly fit for Alison. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
