Socialization- The Homeschooler's S word

I think I need to do a little bit of explaining. I haven’t completely left Homeschoolblogger. I’m still intending to post on here, and comment on here, but my main blog is now joshualetchford.wordpress.com. And yeah, I can’t believe I forgot to put down my new address when I declared I was moving! How embarrassing…

In my last post, I shared a bit about what happened when I spent a week in Canberra. I’ll share some photos sometime… but I didn’t take very many photos, and I think the other delegates are intending to facebook their photos- which probably means I’ll have to get my head around facebook… (major rant about technology etc. etc. etc.)

I was the only homeschooled student among those 30 other 16-17 year olds, and I found it very interesting to see how 30 of my peers interacted for a whole week. Of course, Homeschoolers are always being asked “what about socialization” but in the end, I realised that I was indeed socialized.

On the first day, we had a picnic to get to know each other. Most of the delegates formed this huge oval so that everybody could talk to everybody- although there were often two or three conversations going on. As we got to know each other a bit better, everybody split off into groups of 4-6 delegates. I found that a little tricky, because I am used to either going to a friends’ place, playing with all the kids, or mingling in church and other adult functions. In church or other functions, you talk to an adult for 5-10 minutes, he goes off to get a coffee, and you wander around to the next interesting conversation. Here, people largely stayed in the same groups over the week, and since I didn’t do that, I wasn’t in the hive of social activity. I wasn’t shunned or ignored in any way and I was fully included- I just had a different model of socializing than they had.

All in all, I realized that homeschooling had given me the ability to socialize very well with many people, and with people of different ages. It was encouraging to realize that. 

Does anybody else have observations from times there were large numbers of kids socializing together?

10:15 AM - Sep. 23, 2009 - post comment

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