There's still a ways to go before the first day we sat down in our home "school room" with a shiny new pile of textbooks and a plastic box full of new school supplies.
Long before I was school aged, it seemed like everybody wanted to teach me something. My oldest brother taught me the basic addition facts. My sister's friend sat down one day at our old upright piano and taught me "First March" from the piano books. I sat on my dad's lap and watched him coach the older kids with their algebra. My next older brother may have done more than any of them by building 3D mazes in the hay that had to be solved blind and crawling.
One magical day when I was four, I remember looking at the first page of Go, Dogs, Go and seeing the connection between the letters I saw and the sounds I heard. After that moment, I don't remember ever wanting to read a book and not being able to do so.
I'm not sure exactly what led up to that moment. Lots of people read me lots of books. I seem to recall that Mom had a scrapbook made of a comic strip that introduced the letters and their sounds: for "h," for instance, there was a fellow sitting in an h-shaped chair and puffing from running, "h-h-h." We had probably already gone through that. And that was that. A few years ago I came across a letter I wrote to my grandmother shortly after I turned five, so apparently I had learned to write by that time, too.
Meanwhile, my parents were reconsidering their educational options. At the time they had at least two children in a private Christian school some forty minutes away. It must have been a significant burden both logistically and financially. Adding me to the equation would have further complicated things.
And so, through whatever mysterious means parents use to make decisions (I'm still trying to figure it out), they decided that my oldest sister would switch to the local public high school, my eighth grade brother would come home, and they would try homeschooling him, me, and for convenience my next younger brother, who had just turned four. Just for a year, to see how things turned out.
Thus we began.
For the whole series, click on The Things I Remember. | 