It’s been ages since the last homeschooling thread. We deem it high time for another place to discuss life outside the educational system.
Patience, Please
This site is under reconstruction and will look strange for a while. We regret the inconvenience.
I was homeschooled for second, fifth, sixth, and half of seventh grade, but with skipping a grade and our math teacher being as wonderfully helpful as she is, I sometimes still feel semi-homeschooled. Sometimes it’s tempting to turn my back on public school and its incalculable nuisances, but I would miss my friends.
I’ve never been to public or private school.
Homeschooling’s okay. We’ve done more of an “unschooling” approach, which isn’t helping me feel calm about the ever closer drawing college threat, as I know I’ve moaned about on other parts of the ‘blog.
That’s pretty much all I have to say at the moment. That, and I should be doing schoolwork right now. Lately I have not been very self-motivated. Ugh.
I’m pretty much in Fiddler’s boat, though the second paragraph doesn’t apply so much.
I really need to be doing school. Ugh.
I’ve been homeschooled since fourth grade. It’s rather fun- but I miss my old school, as well.
I’ve been unschooled all my life except for half of 3rd grade, and that was horrible.
Thanks for the thread GAPAs! (I hope it was because of my post on the suggestion box, but either way, still thank you!)
I’ve never been homeschooled – I have been to a lot of schools, but never homeschooled. I do know several people who are homeschooled, however, and they all seem to have a lot of different opinions on it. So what are yours? (that’s for anyone, whether or not you are homeschooled.)
And also, for those of you who are homeschooled: (By the way, this is solely for curiosity’s sake, since I feel like this is one area of life that I’m quite uninformed in but is curious to learn about)I know this is a general question, but what is it like? As in, do you have grades? Or tests? Or is it simply learn the material at your own pace? My friend who is homeschooled says she goes to a homeschooling school, which sounds sort of weird to me, but I guess that some people must do it. And also, do you feel like you can have a lot of friends outside of your family? Not to say that homeschoolers aren’t social, knowing one of my friends who is I know that’s not the case, but still. I know she has to get out of the house and do a lot of stuff to meet new people.
Anyways, sorry for the long post and congrats if you read any of that.
Thanks!
Keep in mind that this is all solely my experience and other people may have had other experiences.
I like being homeschooled, but I’ve never done anything else, so I can’t say how much it compares. We don’t really have grades. Recently, I’ve actually started getting grades. Sort of. See, we do this Co-op thing on Fridays, where a bunch of us homeschoolers get together and have a history class, a literature class, and a spanish class. We do little mini-reports for the class every week, then turn them in to the teacher and she gives them back the next week, with a grade on it. Which is the first grade I’ve ever gotten.
And we don’t usually have tests. I took a standardized test for my area online a couple of years ago, but I don’t think it really meant anything.
Yes, I have several friends. There’s several homeschooling groups in my hometown I attend. Co-op, obviously, and Drama, and then Youth Group, which isn’t exclusively homeschooled, but the majority is homeschooled anyway. So yes, I have a fair amount of friends, though lots of them overlap between groups.
My “homeschooling” experience differs from the rest because homeschooling isn’t really encouraged/completely legal in austria. I was an “external student”, so I took all the tests sent to me via email and attended school for a month each semester to take all the tests in person. The advantage was that I skipped art, PE and music and could learn at my own pace, i.e. I was finished school one month earlier and had only about four hours a day. Unfortunately, I was never in school long enough to make real friends and I had to pay attention in class the whole time and suck up to the teachers a bit.
Well, I think every homeschooler probably does things a bit differently. As for me:
My parents started homeschooling my sister and I when I was midway through second grade (my sis was midway through 4th, at the time). And by my parents, i suppose I really mean my mother. Dad, both then and now, works a regular job Monday through Friday. He would be gone in the morning by the time any of us got up (he leaves for work early, as he not only commutes about an hour, but he’s a morning person, and he likes being at the office when very few people are around), and gets home about 5 pm.
So Mom was in charge of our schooling. I remember in the early years of our schooling, a lot of our books were things mom picked up from sales at various schools. She bought math textbooks and the like, and sort of supervised our study, although i think even then a lot of it was self-taught. History, I remember her checking out books from the library–there was this one series, I don’t remember what it was called, but it was basically a series of textbooks–that she would read to us. We often either all three curled up in her and dad’s bed upstairs, or relocated to the couch, where Mom would read the bulk of the text, and to keep my sis and I entertained, we got to read the captions on the pictures, and any of the text in the margins. I still remember the thrill I got from getting to read the caption that contained “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” (for a little kid, getting to cuss without reprimand is fun.).
We also had quite a few historical fiction books that we got to read to supplement our history education, which taught us stuff, but also kept us entertained, as it wasn’t merely boring textbook stuff. I recall reading “The Crucible”, “The Witch of Blackbird Pond”, something by, oh, what was his name, I think it ws the guy who founded Rhode Island, something like that–really long, really boring, I sorta kinda skipped half to a full page every other page or so, especially if there was no dialogue…Hehe, mom didn’t know that. We read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Anne Frank’s diary (I actually don’t think I ever finished it. whoops.), and numerous other historical fiction books from various time periods throughout history. and like I said, mom read us those more textbook style books, too.
I remember sometime around 6 or 7th grade, or thereabouts, I took an English course through somewhere via email. I had some guy for a teacher, he’d email me assignments and I had to email him my papers and such. I remember having to do a research type paper–i wrote on why cat’s eyes reflect light; I had to write a biography (I chose George Washington), and various other assignments, I believe, that I dont’ really recall.
I also remember doing science fair projects for the first few years of homeschooling, before I finally got the guts to say it wasn’t something I actually wanted to do anymore. Or something like that.
We did spelling and logic, and we participated in a homeschool spelling bee (my sis made it to state twice, me once).
For several years, we took Spanish, a homeschooler mother in the area was teaching it, and quite a few homeschooling families partook. We also took an art class that another homeschooling mother offered, at one point.
Then, when my sister reached 8th grade, and then when I myself reached it, the style of our homeschooling changed significantly. At this point, the vast majority of our courses were correspondence courses. That is, Mom ordered courses through various colleges (they offered highschool level correspondence classes, in addition to college courses), I took some through Nebraska-Lincoln, through North Dakota, through Alaska-Fairbanks, and several through the college that I currently attend.
Although some of our courses were still non-correspondence, the correspondence courses far out numbered the others. Basically, the school would sent the materials: textbooks, syllabus, if it was something like physics/chemistry with a lab, they’d send the necessary materials. Our tests had to be proctored by someone, which ended up being one of the librarians at the local public library. We would complete the assignments, which, depending ont eh school and the course, could be either online multiple choice assignments, or several pages of short answer type questions. The courses with the online multiple choice assignments (Nebraska-Lincoln), usually had 3 so-called projects per semester course. For English/History courses, these were papers. For chemistry/physics/spanish several pages of short answer type stuff. Well, spanish I guess was a lot of translating sentences/conjugation, not so much short answer, but…You get the idea.
Sometime during 8th or 9th grade, Mom got a part time job. Also, sometime during this general time period was when my sister and I migrated our studies from the kitchen table to our bedrooms. This made procrastination and pretending to school work so much easier. I mean, even when mom was home and we were at the kitchen table, we had developed the technique of having a pleasure book we were reading located nearby, when mom was out of the room, or was in her recliner where she couldn’t really see us unless she sat up and craned her head around (which would have been difficult for her), we tended to be reading these, instead of actually doing our work. I also at one time had a second notebook, in which I was working on an HP fanfic, located underneath my school notebook, so I could pretend to be studiously writing away, while in reality doing nothing remotely related to school.
Mom being away a couple or so days a week only made this easier. the moment she left, we’d either jump straight back into bed (as she was leaving about the time we’d be getting up to start working), or just migrate upstairs to play games on the computer or switch on the TV and watch PBS (little kid shows are fun).
Days she was home, once we’d migrated into our room, we could easily have a pleasure book on our floor, and quick fling it there the moment we heard Mom coming to peek in on us. That, or we’d sit in our respective doorways and hold whispered conversations, although Mom usually seemed to be able to hear us, even whens he was upstairs….When she was home, Mom was usually in her recliner or upstairs at the computer. both of these locations were ones that if we had our ears tuned to listen in for her approach, it was hard to miss. The top stair creaks, so we’d hear whens he started down them, and could easily switch from napping/reading to pretending to be working. The recliner also made a distinctive noise when she put the footrest down. Cue tossing aside a book or other non-school activity and diving for our books.
Honestly, procrastinating is one of the main things I learned from homeschooling. don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot of school, too, but I didn’t ahve the motivation to just get my stuff done. Becaus, really, if I’d set my mind to it, I easily could have gotten done with my school, at the very least, a month early each semester, probably more. And as our parents told us numerous times, if we finished the semester’s work early, we could be done for the year (I mean, if we finishe difrst semester early, they’d ahve given us second semester, but when we finished that we would ahve been done). Of course, we didn’t listen, kept procrastinating, and usually ended up not getting any christmas or spring break, and working at least a month into the summer, because we would rather procrastinate and accomplish literally nothing for days if not weeks on end, then just get our stuff done and ahve all the time in the world to do whatever we wanted. Junior year, I procrastinated so badly I didn’t even get a summer vacation. I was lucky my mother still let me go to the release of Deathly Hallows (it was summer 2007). I finished my Junior year end of August, just in time to start on my Senior year.
Looking back, I really wish I’d just gotten the stuff done, as I easily could ahve, and it would ahve saved me numerous yelling matches with my parents and a lot of stress. I mean, the writing assignment projects? I would spend a month “working on them”. “I’m working on it, mom, I’ve started, it’s just taking awhile, but I’m working on it.” Yeah, right. Finally, after about a month, when it’s a good three weeks past when I was supposed to finish it by? My parents would both be so caking pissed off and fed up, telliing me that “If you don’t finish it by the end of today, we’re going to not let you go to such and such.” So, not ahving started upon it at all, I would finish it by the end of the day. Yeah, my parents gave me one week for those. I procrastinate for a month, then did it in one day. Real logical, I know. Like I said, if I could do it over….Actually, to be honest, I probablyw ouldn’t do any differently, although i wish I would have done differently….Maybe it would make me procrastinate less in college. At leat here, I get the stuff done, even if I wait until the last second possible.
And that probably casts homeschooing in a bad light, but, really, I think I learned a lot more in it than I probablyw oudl have in regular school. Afterall, I took a huge number of college courses in high school, and took an incredibly good AP chem course online (which got me a 4 on the chemistry AP).
sure, there were fights with the parents. We’d have screaming matches which always ended in my sis and I in tears, and often my mother, as well, when we didn’t just get our bloody school work done in a reasonable amount of time. And my sis and I would invariably manage to get into fights–especially on days when it was just the two of us home, I often would scream at her at the top of my lungs over something totally pointless, just totally cussing her the heck out, and threatenging all sorts of violence to her possessions if she didn’t do what i wanted her to do. And there were endless opportunites for blackmail, as well, as we had so much “dirt” on the other. “I’ll tell Mom you were playing internet games instead of doing such and such if you tell her that I was cussing at you and threatening to cut the strings on your violin [yes, I did. I even went so far as to unzip her violin case, with scissors in hand…..I never claimed I was a nice person.]”
But all in all, I liked homeschooling, I really did. When we were younger, public school was a threat to keep us in line. When mom got really pissed at procrastination or us fighting and yelling and screaming at her/each other, we’d get told we were getting enrolled in public school ASAP. Cue the waterworks and us swearing we’d stop and we’d be good and do whatever Mom wanted of us….Wow, poor mom.
So, um, yeah. Long post. We homeschooled so that we could accel at the rate we were capable of, which was much faster than that of what we could do at the public schools. I was doing 5th grade math in about 2nd grade, my sis started AP Calculus AB in her freshman year of highschool, took it correspondence, got an A, and a 3 on the AP test, then continued on to Calc BC.
Um, yeah, anyway. I liked homeschooling, i really did, procrastination and stress and fighting and all.
I was homschooled from first to the start of eight grade, and I wish i had gone to school sooner. I only had to do tests and thing for maths, and felt like I couldn’t have close friends because everyone I knew went to school with their friends. It was okay, though.
6~ Homeschooling is a very unique approach, no family really does the exact same thing.
As I said before, we take more of an “unschooling” approach, so I get to learn at my own pace. Why it took me two years to finish Algebra 1, in other words.
There are all manner of curriculums one can use, we use a combination. I used to use Math-U-See (horrid name, even horrider program) and now use Teaching Textbooks (which also has horridness) for math. Writing Strands for writing. Teaching Company for other subjects, like Chemistry, History and Religions, currently. Oh, and Understanding Complexity. We were doing Game Theory but it was taking too much time and not making enough sense, so we stopped, but I hope to watch them again at some point.
For me, a typical homeschooling day goes something along the lines of
Wake up
Breakfast, etc.
Listen to Teaching Company Great Courses lectures (the Teaching Co. records/films professors from all over the country that have won awards or are noted as very good in their fields giving lectures on their topics. Most are college professors, a handful are high school level)
Discuss with mom.
Lunch, chores, time wasting, whatever.
Math, Writing, Spanish (Rosetta stone), Chemistry/history/world literature/whatever textbook by myself.
Dinner
TimewastingMuseBlogIdeally, that is. Often I don’t get to it all, or other things come up, or whatever happens and I don’t get it all done. But yeah, that’s the basic idea.
I don’t really have too much of a problem meeting people or having friends, I mean, besides the fact that I’m a general weirdo, awkward, sometimes shy (yeah, I know it probably doesn’t appear so, especially in my last batch of ‘blog photos, but believe it.), whatever. So besides the fact that I’m currently going through a mini friend crisis, yeah, I have no problem socializing.
The only thing that’s a pain with being homeschooled and having friends in public school (and most of mine are) is schedules. Because for me, weekends don’t really make a difference. I do schoolwork the whole week, maybe a bit less on weekends, but some at least. It’s all kind of the same, since during the week I’m going places and doing other stuff as well.
So when I need the weekends to do schoolwork that I didn’t do during the week, my friends are free, and I’m not. And during the week, I can be free, but they’re not. It’s a vicious circle.
That, and feeling left out of things that happen at school. Like I get to hear about the games, the lunch table covos, the crazy teachers, all the fun they have with each other every day, the things they do to get together, and I’m always excluded, because I’m not part of that. That really bites, but in a way, that’s suckish friendship, not just home vs. public school. *shrug*
Most of my friends live way far away anyways, because I’ve met a lot of them through living history/sailing/Jamestown/random other activities.
It works. I’m pretty okay by myself, otherwise I’d probably go nuts. But MB, FB and texting kind of constitute my link with the outside world for the most part. And my parents wonder why I spend inordinate amounts of time online? Figure it out people, I want to know I’m not the only person on the planet once in awhile.
*shrug again*
Long post, congrats if you read the whole thing. But yeah, that’s my experience of homeschooling. In some ways I wish I would have had the guts to tell my mom I wanted to go to public school, before I hit the later years of high school and was so terrified of being way behind that I said I didn’t want to. But that chance is gone, so I can’t dwell on it too much, now I just want to finish high school somehow, as soon as possible.
Oh, thanks for your answer. (And to everyone else who responded. It was quite interesting.)
You see, I don’t know how I would ever be able to be homeschooled. This is awful, but if I’m with my family 24/7 it’s just really…bad. Like, my sisters and I will start fighting over something stupid, and then my mom will get mad, who will get my dad mad…and then we’re all just generally not happy campers. Hence the reason why I hate summer so much. But I guess you’d just get used to that if you’re homeschooled.
Plus, I need a routine. Like, having a schedule is really helpful for me…but I’d also love not to be able to have stress about grades, and having your whole school life basically fit into a single number.
This sounds odd, but while I didn’t have problems with my family while I was homeschooled, I can’t imagine going back to being homeschooled. It drives me insane spending my whole weekend at home. I get the routine thing too.
We don’t really have that many problems either. I mean, me and my sister have a bit of a hard time getting along with my brother, but that would happen anyway.
I never really had (big) problems with my family while homeschooled because I was only allowed to do my best subjects alone. Not that I didn’t have plenty of tricks: I would do my favorite subjects (math, history, e.t.c…) almost every day, working hard one day so that I could stare into space the next. By the end of my homeschooling career, I was allowed to do everything by myself. The result was that I nearly finished math after two months and had to slow down, while my german textbook resembled swiss cheese (I did everything that didn’t include writing an essay, which I loathed).
That’s pretty much what I do, except I argue with mom instead of discussing. The public education system has its flaws – in fact, my art teacher was completely unfair and got fired last year because he (I heard) hit a kid for making a mistake with his project. I am homeschooled because in 1st grade my teacher was out sick. The sub just let us watch stupid girly movies wike Cin-doo-wewaa and Boody ‘nd da Beesd. Mewie Pawpins too. Anyway, my mom (yay for her) got fed up and decided to up and homeschool me. I’ve been homeschooled for pretty much 8 years by now…
this thread is very interesting to me because I’ve always wondered how people are homeschooled as I know surprisingly little about it…
I wonder if I would have done well with some kind of modified homeschooling thing…looking back on it as I am about to graduate from high school, public school has consistently let me down. I appreciate the structure and many other things but as for the education I received…hmm
So another question that some of you have touched on a bit already. What was it that inspired you/your parents to take up homeschooling? What do you think of public/private schools (or what’s your general idea of them?) I’m sure it must be frustrating to always have to deal with people saying “haha if only i was homeschooled,then i wouldn’t have to do anything!” or other misconceptions.
Luna– was it difficult applying to colleges? how do you do that exactly? i know you’d have APand SAT stuff, but with teacher recs and other things, how did that work? As I was applying I wondered about it but never had anyone to ask…
i thoroughly enjoy this thread
What inspired my parents- we were cruising (like Armada) so I couldn’t attend any school. I still had to bend over backwards (no report card grade worse than a B) to stay in the system.
No, for the most part, applying for colleges wasn’t any different for me than a public schooled student. There were one or two colleges–Washington State, I think–that, since I was homeschooled, wanted a detailed description of all the classes I’d taken. So my ever wonderful mother did that for me. I also remember asking a school or two if my mother could write the advisor (or whatever) recommendation, since I’d been homeschooled. Also, for something–I don’t think it was the actual colleges, maybe the pre-vet scholars program I’m in–I asked my online AP Chem teacher if he’d write me a recommendation, and he wrote me a very lovely one. (He was great).
Transcripts and such, I think all of them accepted the homeschool transcripts Mom made–she probably sent along copies of my SAT/ACT/SAT II/AP scores, as well. I know she had them printed on the transcript, but I feel she may have sent copies of the originals, in addition.
But, really, most of the schools didn’t ahve any extra hoops at all that I had to jump through, so it wasn’t that much of a bother.
My primary school that I went to for less than a year sucked.
ML, your name links to a chinese site. GAPAs?
Got it. Thanks!
Oops…
If I were to be home-schooled, that’d be great. I’d probably never leave my bedroom again, though…
The school systems in my area aren’t very good. I attend classes at the community college, and while not being the same as home-schooling, there is a lot more time spent at home and independent study.
If there is a child who would preform better in an environment such as that of his own home, I think that it should be allowed. However, I think that it would depend on the intelligence of the parent. Some parents aren’t good at teaching or aren’t relatively the most educated. Sometimes parents keep their students at home to keep them from learning about different mindsets (gasp!) or to hide abuse (double gasp!), and while the first one might seem relatively minor in comparison to child abuse, in a twenty-first century world, an open mind is the most important thing that one can have.
I can’t help but think that if there were no home-schooling, some children could live much happier lives.
Erm, I’ve had a pretty good experience in school overall, although sometimes I feel like I’m coasting a little too much. I mean, I want to be challenged, but not too much. (Lazy, lazy moi.) And then whenever I think I’m being challenged, I’m faced with something way too hard. So in general the pacing can be annoying, but to me, but being in a school atmosphere is where I get the most work done (hence the reason why I procrastinate so much of my homework) so I guess it would be better than homeschooling.
lol. Have you guys seen Rhett and Link’s Homeshcooler song on YouTube? I would recommend it.