Disadvantages of Homeschooling and Other Memories of Our Homeschool

Dear TEAMS,

In my last blog post about Homeschooling, I was being interviewed by a neighbor.  Here is the continuation of the transcript of the Interview, picking up with me talking.

Disadvantages of Homeschooling

I don’t believe the “socialization” issue, you could do a whole paper on the socialization issue, why that’s foolish.  A kid doesn’t learn their behaviors by being around other kids--that’s, that’s ridiculous.  If it was really true that there’s a “socialization” problem with homeschoolers, then there wouldn’t be school bullies. If there are bullies at your school, well they’re plenty socialized and they’re being socialized so what does that really say about that?  I don’t agree with that craziness.

However, there is validity to the fact that I’d like my children to really be around more diversity of beliefs. Our own personal faith stance is one of the Bible, but I really want them to be around kids who don’t believe the bible, so they can appreciate what it’s like to not believe the Bible and to see what their points of view are and to learn from them.  I can’t really toot the diversity horn [enough] because we do live in a very white, middle-class community.  I know that there are kids who are in a lower-class in the school system, but they still my kids are around a lot of kids who may not be [as well] off as financially as what we are. There is something about being able to have access to people who don’t believe what you believe and who see their life differently than how we see it and I don’t want to protect them from that, I want them to have the opportunity to use their brains to figure out what they think.  That is a disadvantage in terms of I have to make sure that I give them plenty of exposure to as much of that as I can.  Thankfully, because of our faith stance there’s mission trips and inner-city outreach and things like that that we can do.

Disadvantages to being homeschooled… it is a monetary burden on our family because public education is paid for by the taxpayers so we pay our school taxes but we have to buy our curriculum, we have to pay for our field trips, [pay for] anything that’s involved with academics. We have had to invest thousands of dollars to make sure they are learning.

I’m old enough that my kids weren’t allowed to be part of extracurricular sports at [our town’s school system]. In fact, we had had some run-ins with someone who’s no longer part of the school system about any sort of involvement in the school system. It was Governor Rendell who signed an Act when he was in office stating  that we need to have fair access to that and I am really very thankful for that and I think that our children have been an asset to the [town’s] school system because they wore the blue and white and they helped the Cross-Country team and the Track teams do very well.  They were a part of that, got to be a part of the teams there too, which is nice. I’m glad they got to be exposed to really good people, really good students, and you {smiles}.

The last disadvantage of homeschooling that I’d list would be a personal one, there are just some days I just don’t want to do school.  I mean, my life would be very different if I didn’t homeschool my kids because I would have 6 hours every day to myself. I could do more with my home-based business. I could be more involved in [volunteer work]. I [get] very emotionally drained from working my day and there’s a lot of volunteer opportunities I have chosen not to do. So those are some of the disadvantages. It’s work.

 Q: So last night you sad that there aren’t really “grade-levels” that you teach, am I right?
A: [Yes.]

Q: So would you mind like, explaining that a little more how that works?
A: Sure. Not every home-schooler is like this okay?  Some home-schoolers are very grade-level oriented. So they take classroom work, and they just do it at home, they “school at home.” Some home-schoolers are called “unschoolers” and they don’t believe that academic book learning has a place. And they want the child to go out and learn and they do guided learning with the child, they take a hike and look at the leaves, ok? That’s unschooling. I fall somewhere in between. I feel like school is suppose to serve the child and the child does not serve the school. Curriculum, what you use to learn, serves the child.  It’s a tool, but the child does not serve the curriculum. So if my child is not getting mathematical concepts, or is struggling with an emotional problem and needs to take some time off,  we stop the curriculum and we help the child deal with their emotional problem for days or weeks. Or, if the curriculum isn’t serving the child, we have to just stop the curriculum and say, “Okay, lets do a little bit of remedial work and figure out what you’re doing.” For instance [in] reading, it’s a fact that boys learn to read at, for the most part, later than girls do. Just because of the way, physiologically, their brain is developed. So I did not teach my children, my boys how to read, as early as I did with girls. So in terms of reading (most boys would be third graders would be around the age of 8) when my boys were around the age of 8, they didn’t know how to read yet and so they would not have fit into 3rd grade in [our] school system. They would’ve been considered remedial. However, right around 5th grade, everything’s clicking with them, and did not have to really teach them how to read.  I could sit down with them and I always read to my children—every day after lunch we’d sit down and we’d read--so they were being exposed to literature. I don’t want you to think that I wasn’t reading to the kids.  By 6th grade, they were putting 2 and 2 together and saying, “Hey every time mom says  the word ‘the’, it looks like that little cross, and that little line with a hump and that little curve with the line in the middle of it. That must be the word the!” They did that on their own. Now I’m not saying that every child would do that, that’s how I felt the curriculum could serve my children instead of my children serving the curriculum. My boys would’ve been so frustrated, soo frustrated if they had not been able to [pick up reading as fast as their classmates].  Then compounded with that, then they would’ve been put in the [remedial]class.  They can disguise it any way they want, they could call it the Cardinal group and the Bluebird group in the elementary setting but all the kids know that the Bluebird group was the “dummies” you know? Unfortunately it’s sad, and my boys would’ve been so frustrated with that. That’s how I don’t know what grade m children are.

[Another example is that] T is basically doing her senior project right now; she’s writing a novel. And so technically after this year, she’s going to finish it this summer, she’s basically kind of done with her English, because I’ve wrapped a lot [or other English and Writing instruction] into that novel. But for her math, she’s finishing Algebra 2, so she’s a sophomore in math.  You see how that works? It made more sense for her because she wanted to write a novel and I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Oh I’m sorry, you have to wait till your senior year.”  So that’s, what the grade-level [thing] is.”

Q: My one friend, her and her brother are homeschooled and she goes to a place called a Co-op, have you ever heard of that?
A: “Yes, mhhmm. Sure.”

Q: So do you guys belong to anything like that?
A: “We don’t this year, but we have belonged to other Co-ops. Yep.”

Q: So then did they have like… elective classes there then or..?A: There are all levels of co-ops. In this area there are 3 co-ops where they just go every week and you’re taught by a teacher and you get your assignments for a week or 2 weeks and then you show up again in another 2 weeks.  Then there are elective co-ops.  For instance HATS is a co-op that is very drama-based. Puts on musicals, things like that, choral--their musical program they’ve gone to China for….”

A: (From T in another room) “ No Mom, that’s different, the co-op is called CLCHM, HATS just uses the space at the co-op.”

A: (Me) “Oh, I apologize, ok, well I stand corrected.  S was in a co-op this year with Bev. She lives 3 houses down. And he did science and English Composition. And Art.”

Q: So is a co-op sort of more like a ‘day-school’ and they just kind of give you something and you come home and your parents kind of guide you through?
A: Some co-ops are like that, that’s what S’s co-op is like but you can just have an elective co-op. Here’s an example: I did a field trip co-op one year. I planned 9 field trips, one a month, September through April. And a whole bunch of families from my church came to my co-op.  We went to the Whitaker Center, we went around town to local businesses, we… I’m trying to think of where else we we went, I think we went to the national clock museum. A co-op is just a group of people who are just doing things to supplement their homeschool. It can be like, well it can be academic or it can be just activities that you do together.

Q: Do you have to teach physical education?
A: Well if I was a homeschooler I would be required to. I don’t teach a physical education class just because I’m very fitness-oriented and a nutrition-oriented. So to be a successful adult, you need to know that you should exercise everyday. So all my kids get exercise everyday because its just required, that’s just what is required in our house. I have S in Boys Club baseball, M and E both are runners, T has her archery and has to take walks everyday. I don’t teach physical education because I’m required to by law, I do it because that’s what a successful adult does.

Q: Did you have to sign an Affidavit and get it notarized by the county’s superintendent or was that just thrown out of the window because you’re a private tutor instead of a homeschooler?A: I am in a legal gray area, being a private tutor. Not to the delight of many people though. {laughs}

Q: This might go with my question earlier about being in a co-op, but do you guys belong to any group or organization like HSLDA?A: Well the HSLDA, we did belong to that, [but] even they can’t actually represent us.  The law for private tutoring is a gray area in [our state], but we did belong to it because we really believe in what they’re doing, in terms of parent’s rights and their children.

Q: Have you ever done group home-schooling with another family before?A: Well I had a science co-op again where we did our science together with another family. Science is a good one to do with another family because it involves a lot of lab equipment and stuff so it’s just easier to go together and buy stuff.

Q: What would you do if home-schooling became illegal in the United States or [our state] where you couldn’t privately tutor your kids?
A: Wow. That’s a really good question.  I hope it never comes to that. I would fight it and I would go to jail because that’s a line in the sand for me. They’re my kids, I get to decide what happens with them. I’m not an irresponsible human being; I’m not a danger or a menace to society; I ought to be allowed to guide my children to adulthood the way that I see fit.

[Our Friend commented]: I read somewhere that it states, “a parent must ‘enroll’ their child, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be in a public school.” I mean if you give birth to your own children you should be able to choose how you want to bring them up.

[Me]: I totally agree with you there. Some people just need to learn how to agree to disagree though, and unfortunately some of them sit on the school board of the [our town] school system. I don’t think that the government knows what’s best for my child; I know what’s best for my child.

Q: What are your thoughts on public education?
A: Well, I want to make it very clear that I am not anti-public education. There are some kids who are home-schooled that I think would be better served by the public school system. They are few and far between and they are an extreme exception that the media kind of gets their claws into and makes the millions of kids that are home-schooled, they make people think that home-schooling is like that (what’s happening with these kids). I don’t think that public education is going to hell in a hand-basket. I do think that public education is not what anyone, including the teachers wants it to be. When I was student teaching, when I was doing my junior observation 20 years ago when I was training to be a teacher, all I knew was that I was around a whole bunch of people who didn’t like coming to work. They didn’t like what they were doing, they saw their school as a job, just another job. They didn’t see it as education and they started out really wanting to be a part of education and maybe changing lives but they just got [dragged] down.  All I knew was that the best thing that ever happened to me was my student teaching because that taught me that I didn’t want to be a student teacher in the public school system. It was too big for me to fix, and I was not being called into that area. But I don’t want you to think then that public school teachers are evil or the public school system is evil. I don’t.  I think there are a lot of really good people who feel like their hands are tied about what they can do. And I’ve met many of them and I feel really badly because they are extremely talented, smart, intelligent teachers who could just do so much more if things were different for them.