• Aug. 6, 2007 - Back to Homeschool--Question 1
In case you hadn't heard, Randi at i have to say..., is doing a "Back to Homeschool" thing this week. This is the sort of thing bloggers love, someone encouraging them to write about themselves. I, of course, couldn't resist.
First question: What led to your decision to homeschool?
I have visited this question often both in the blogosphere and here in the so-called real world so I'll just post the short version today.
Neither my husband nor I had very good experiences in public school. I'm fond of saying that I learned to hate school in Kindy. That was when my family went on a month-long vacation to visit my grandparents and the teachers gave me a cart full of work to have completed by my return. I had to work when my little brother was out enjoying the snow. I finished every last piece of paper only to return and discover the class hadn't done one weeks worth of the materials I was given and I had to redo everything. Almost nothing I did while on vacation counted. Before that time I loved school. To make sure I keep this short and to keep me off my soap-box let's just say it went down hill after that.
I learned about homeschooling when I was 16 and immediately knew it was for me. Unfortunately, when we finally got around to having kids it looked for a very long time that we would have only one. I had always envisioned homeschooling a large family and could not make our situation fit into what I thought homeschooling was supposed to be. I had never known anyone who had homeschooled only one so when DB1 was 3 we enrolled him in one of the best private schools in our county (I still wasn't about to send my kid off to public school). By the end of his first year at school we were surprised to discover we were pregnant with our second child.
Then, of course, our second had a birth defect. We learned far too much about germs while we were in the NICU with him and decided we really had no choice but to homeschool. Our son's health depended on it.
Here we are, 5 years and 2 more kids later, and as I look back I'm thankful that things have turned out as they have, but I also wish I hadn't been so terrified to homeschool an only child. Had I known then what I know, about the resources available and about what homeschooling really is (NOT just school at home) I think we would have made a much different decision in the beginning. |
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Posted by Anonymous 
• Aug. 6, 2007 - Untitled Comment