Thoughts on homeschooling

I am just now realizing how proud I am to be homeschooled and how foundational this experience was for my life. When I first started public school (in grade nine) I was really proud of being homeschooled. I soon learned not to be and, although I still talk about it fairly openly (I'm a very open person), it is no longer one of the first things you will find out about me when you meet me, but yes, I was homeschooled.

The way I see it (and I could be wrong) just from what I have experienced myself and what I have heard from other friends who were homeschooled, there seem to be three basic types which I then generalize further into two categories.

Category one: internet/ curriculum based
This category is pretty much JUST doing school at home.
If you are fully curriculum based your parent or guardian will probably act as your teacher but he or she will be led all the way by a curriculum which will tell them what to teach you and when.

If you are internet based it seems that this is pretty much just like taking an online course for a public school. In that case someone you may not even know in the real world will be teaching you, guiding what you do when, and grading your work.

Both of these options seem to include a lot of individual book work although there can also be group projects/ experiments/ and activities with siblings or with a homeschool group.

The second category is what I like to think of as learning by interest.

I have heard of people who will literally not teach until their kid asks a question. That may sound crazy at first because the system is so focused on making sure kids learn certain things by a certain time, but think how many questions kids ask that we are too busy to take the time to answer. What if those were learning opportunities missed?

My mom chose a bit of mix and match. Now the first half or more of my homeschooling days occurred before we had a computer with access to the internet, so we never used that option. My mom never taught based on one complete curriculum but she would mix and match books from different curriculums. Sometimes we did book work, and sometimes we'd do an experiment or project together, the idea of which she might have gotten from one of the books. However, she didn't JUST mix the different curriculums, for she also mixed them with her own ideas and with learning by interest. We only had curriculum books ordered specifically for certain subjects. A huge portion of our learning was thanks to the local library. We made numerous trips to the library and mom would ask us to pick an interest, something we were curious about, and we would get books out about that subject. Sometimes when we were done reading it we would create some sort of project to illustrate our knowledge.

In the two years after my sister went to high school, before I did, my learning became even more experiential. I got to pretty much choose everything I wanted to read about and because I really enjoyed hands on projects I made a ton of them to illustrate the knowledge I gained from my readings. I also got to do a lot of things like bake with my mom for "cooking class" or practice drawing flowers in the garden for "art class."

Another major part of my learning was literature. Technically literature was never on our list of things to learn. We worked on grammar and spelling work-books and had creative assignments to write poems or stories, but after being taught how to read I don't remember ever being given reading as an assignment. Instead, mum would start every day by reading aloud to us from a novel she had picked. These books would usually be above my reading level, they might have won awards, and they were often about other countries or other time periods so I was learning about stuff, but I thought we were just reading. When school was done usually I would end up dropping a book about butterflies or space or whatever, just to pick up a novel I had picked out myself. I thought reading was fun, but all the while I was growing my vocabulary, my knowledge of how meaning is made, what a good sentence sounds like, empathy, and my knowledge of the world around me. All of this was happening without me even realizing it.

So that is my experience with homeschooling. What were the benefits and was there a downside?

Benefits:

1. Learning at my own pace (I was always a slow learner because I wanted to completely grasp a concept before I moved on)
2. Having someone to talk to. There was just my mom, my sister and I. My teacher's attention was not divided between 30 kids so I could ask all my questions and discuss out loud all my confusions which is how my mind has always worked best.
3. Passions were developed. A lot of my learning was based off of what I was interested in, so I never lost my love of learning. It seemed fairly fun to me rather than something that was forced upon me, because it was something I still wanted to do.
4. I learned critical thinking because we took a short course in it when I was around 10, but the whole style of my learning lent itself to critical thinking because I was always more focused on understanding and grappling with confusion than on deadlines.
5. It developed my creativity because I was encouraged and enabled to think outside of the box.

Downside:

1. My particular homeschool experience left me without ever having gained the social skills I so desperately needed because we didn't have a car, so we could not be part of a homeschool group.
2. I never learned how to handle the stress of a deadline because I had all the time I wanted to grapple with my confusions.
3. I was used to having someone to talk out my questions with and did not learn much independent problem solving which made it overwhelming when suddenly my teachers didn't care about me because I was only one of thirty kids.

NOTE: All of these problems are based on things I ended up learning (or began to learn) in high school, so it's all good man.