Why We Homeschool
I want to preface my post by saying that I know and respect many classroom educators, many of whom are close friends and family members. My decision to homeschool in no way is a protest against all classroom teachers (who have, I believe, a hard and often thankless job that requires creativity and toughness). With that said, here are a few of the reasons we homeschool:
I did public, private, and home schooling growing up, and I’ve volunteered or taught in all three settings as an adult, so I feel like I have a real perspective on all three options. Hands down, my favorite years were homeschooling. I retain the most and have the fondest memories from those years, and I’ve been looking forward to homeschooling my own kids since I was a pre-teen!
In high school, my AP European History teacher (a life-long public school teacher married to our public high school principal) commented on how today’s school system grew out of the factories of the industrial revolution—education is supposed to happen in 50 minute increments, with the days broken up by bells telling you to go to your next task. I’ll never forget my teacher asking what that had to do with learning.
People often ask me how I can focus on four different children of varying ages. Well, it’s much easier than trying to divide my attention between a classroom of 10-25 children of varying ability levels. When I taught 6th grade math and reading, my struggle was always to challenge my top students while teaching the lesson to the average ability kids and trying to keep the two lowest achievers from being totally lost. It’s a myth that a classroom full of kids approximately the same age can learn all subjects at the same pace—they’re all individuals with different strengths in different areas. Frankly, I think this aspect of my job is simpler than any classroom teacher’s!
I love spending time with my kids. It is exhausting but fills me with joy. I love having so much time to sit and read with them, color with them, and watch them play together. I get to have their best hours instead of sending them off during their most energetic part of the day and getting them back when they’re tired and crabby.
I believe that young children, particularly boys, learn by moving, touching, playing. Sitting at a desk in a classroom seven hours a day would severely limit my son’s education.
When I work one-on-one with my kids, I know exactly what they do or don’t understand. I get to see the thrill of comprehension each time they grasp a new concept, and I don’t need to sit them down to take a standardized test to know if they’re learning.
Homeschooling gives us the flexibility to go in depth into topics that particularly interest us. We use our curriculum as our foundation and follow rabbit trails whenever we want. For example, in preschool/kindergarten, I have my kids memorize the names of the Presidents of the US in order (a foundation for future US history). We lived really close to the Reagan Library for several years, and my kids know a ton about Ronald Reagan because we visited so often. After the Reagan Library had a special exhibit on George Washington when my oldest was 6 or 7, he read several books about our first president, not because he had to, but because he was genuinely interested! That’s the kind of learning that sticks with you.
As we start our ninth year of homeschooling, I can attest that the sacrifices of the early years (with four little ones at home, and with four not-quite-so-little ones and a special needs foster child) have borne beautiful fruit. Our kids genuinely like each other. We have wonderful family memories of books we’ve read together, field trips we’ve taken, and topics we’ve studied. One of our favorite memories is the year we studied California state history and took a week-long road trip up and down California, listening to audiobooks in the car and reading books in hotel rooms that coordinated with the historic sites we studied: missions, including where the heroine of the Island of the Blue Dolphins is buried, Alcatraz, scene of the Al Capone Shines My Shoes series, the state capital, Sutters Fort, where Patty Reed’s Doll is on display, the fruit and vegetable fields described in Esperanza Rising. As a second-generation homeschooler, I already knew how wonderful it is to have a family culture shaped by the books we read together; my brothers and I all introduced our future spouses to our childhood favorites, and we still reread the best chapters aloud when we all get together for Christmas. While it’s possible to have fun family memories when your kids are in school, we just have so much more time together to build those bonds. Homeschooling is not for everyone, and it may only be a choice for a season for many, but it is a delight for me.
