In the fall of 1995, my husband and I took a boldly stepped where no one in my family had ever gone before – We started to homeschool.
We started to homeschool for a couple of reasons. We weren’t pleased with our local public schools, but we were also less than thrilled by the poor religious education we had received growing up in Catholic schools. So to ensure that our own children got the kind of religious instruction we never received, we started homeschooling.
I’d love to tell you that it was all magical and memorable. Some of it was. The parts that were memorable were usually because something went wrong! I have video tape of Calvin in first grade with me encouraging to narrate what we had been learning in our homeschool. It was like trying to tie a monkey onto a chair! He was bursting with energy all over the place and could hardly sit still for more than 20 seconds! I remember that we also had problems with Calvin and cheating, his motivation, and just the common homeschooling problems with time management. We also had trials with Calvin’s reading problems.
But this week, I watched my 19 year old son work 30 hours at a job he has had for three years. I watched him get his own food ready, take care of his car, take care of his own clothes and even get himself to church. Despite what everyone told us about how homeschooling would thwart his developing socialization skills,Calvin has developed into a very sociable young mane. This week alone he:
*worked out every day this week with a friend home from college,
*ate dinner most nights with his girlfriend and her family,
*worked a job getting along with superiors, colleagues and the public,
*demurely and gracefully discouraged members of the opposite sex from out right flirting with him.
Clearly in those 9 years of homeschooling from kindergarten to grade eight, we did something very right.
Today Calvin and I sat down and created a resume. I also helped him apply for some Emergency Medical Technician jobs on line. We certainly have come a long way from those first tentative days of homeschool kindergarten!
These are the things that when I look back, helped me the most with Calvin’s education.
1. I found an outlet for all of that energy. With Calvin it was mainly swimming. After fighting the water for a few hours a day, he was much easier to handle!
2. Setting firm guidelines about what was expected academically.
3. Not being married to any one specific curriculum or way of doing things. I found what worked best for this child and kept with it for as long as it was helpful.
4. Not being afraid to ask for outside help when I could afford it. Getting with the reading specialist literally changed our lives for the better.
5. Getting in with a good support group in those early years for fellowship and mentoring. I still cherish the support and friendship from that group of people.
6. Do what’s best for each child. When Calvin hit 8th grade it was clear that he needed to be accountable to someone else besides me. Putting him in a cyber chart school was the best thing at the time for him. It wasn’t classic, pure homeschooling, but it was what worked for our family at that time.
Finally, don’t let the little set backs and problems become discouraging. As it turns out I ended up doing a much better job of educating Calvin than even I knew! But I had to wait until he was 19 years old to start to see it. Home education is a marathon, not a sprint!
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