I've resisted the urge to blog for years--mostly because I've been making my living as a freelance writer/editor for longer than I care to admit. Blog? You mean give it away? Pfft! I spend enough time and energy writing on spec as it is. And with all the discussion boards and forums and social networks I've frequented over the years, somebody somewhere is maintaining a database stuffed with quite enough squirmingly personal information about me, thank you very much.
So. Obviously, I'm blogging right now. Right this second. What changed?
Well, my kiddo-schmiddo came along. Way later than anyone expected (if she'd been born any later, I'd have made the cover of the National Enquirer) and way, way more disruptive. In the good way. Suddenly everything I knew and believed about raising a child went out the window, and before I knew what was happening, I was considering.... homeschooling.
There. I said it.
Now, up until relatively recently, I was like everybody else. I thought homeschoolers were weird, stunted little people desperate to keep their kids from experiencing The Real World. Then, a few years ago, I made contact with a long-lost relative who, as it turned out, was homeschooling her three children. And they were all normal. Actually, cooler than normal. One of the kids was competing in chess competitions at the state level, and one was working at a veterinary hospital while pursuing dual-enrollment at a local college, on her way to earning her D.V.M. And they all walked and talked and held their forks in the right hand and everything.
"You ever heard of John Gatto?" the mom mentioned, in passing, and then of course I was off and running. Not because I thought homeschooling would ever affect my life (my daughter was barely crawling at this point and school seemed as hazily ridiculous as a driver's license) but because, well, I'm nosy.
I looked up John Gatto, all right. And then I kept reading. Books, magazines, Web sites--anything I could get my hands on that was even tangentially related to homeschooling, I read. A couple of years passed, and by then I was convinced that homeschooling had the potential to be far more effective than institutional schooling--especially for a kiddo like mine, who's a breathtakingly exasperating combination of bull-headedness, hyper-sensitivity, and frightening intelligence. My problem was I didn't think I could pull it off. There's this little matter of paying for food and clothes and utilities, and where the heck was I supposed to find time to lecture about Archimedes and administer spelling tests while I was stumping for a living?
No answer yet to that last one. But as I tell my daughter, We don't do things because they're easy. We do them because they're the right thing to do.
For us--for now--homeschooling is the right thing to do. And I'm blogging about our adventures in Homeschool Land in the hopes of encouraging just one someone out there who's on the fence--just as I was encouraged, over and over again, by the blogs I've read over the years.
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Wow Emily! I also had a preconceived notion of what homeschoolers were. Mostly because the only homeschooled children I had ever encountered were those that had been hospitalized and couldn't come in to school so mom had to teach the child with the school's resources (which I guess, thinking about it now, that really wouldn't be categorized as homeschooling) and then there were the students who lived "so far away" from a school that parents had no option but to homeschool. Again, how is that even possible? Like I said, "preconceived notions" and not because I had actually read up on it or anything like that, mostly just ignorance.
ReplyDeleteI'm a certified elementary teacher and the more I read about it, homeschooling doesn't sound like such a bad idea.