The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [104]
Geographic isolation keeps us on the road entirely too much! We try to keep our activities down, but end up overloaded every fall.—Lillian, California
I wouldn’t say we’re isolated in terms of finding other homeschoolers, but we end up driving a lot to see our friends. One problem is that the kids don’t have any friends right in our neighborhood. So seeing their friends depends on both sets of parents coordinating schedules and driving. We used to have good friends who lived only a half mile away whom we saw often. We’ve missed that a lot since they moved.—Linda, Hawaii
Often, of course, geographic isolation is the result of lifestyle choices the family willingly makes. But whether it is completely voluntary or not, such isolation still creates problems getting along from one day to the next. Sometimes answers can be found by way of the post office and the Internet. Sometimes the only solution is in adjusting, adapting, and learning to cope with the situation.
Pen pals of all kinds can help, and pen pals these days are by no means limited to the traditional paper-and-pen version. Online services and the Internet offer all sorts of options for corresponding with people: hobby forums, computer-related forums, children’s forums, professional forums—anything people talk about in person or in print can be found somewhere online.
America Online and the Internet are a great asset to us in our travels. The friendship and tremendous support we have found online can go with us anywhere we can plug our computer into a phone line, and they are the very best source of information about where we are headed. It’s also much easier to stay in contact with our families through e-mail. There are more and more resources available online than we could ever carry with us. We’re thrilled with the ever-expanding possibilities.—Laura, Texas
Pen pals, whatever their form, can eventually lead to in-person visits. Instead of frequent overnights with friends, the isolated homeschooler may grow up making extended visits of a week or a month with treasured friends or relatives. And a family’s whole collection of pen pals can determine the route for the occasional vacation trip.
Mainly, isolated families learn to plan. They collect catalogs and create wish lists or perhaps become heavy users of interlibrary loan services. They bring their lists with them when they get into town or port, or back to the States, and are prepared to grab items they’ve been looking or waiting for. Most of all, isolated homeschoolers learn to live with each other and their surroundings, to value each other’s company, and to develop their ability to make their own resources.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Beyond Homeschooling
THE TYPICAL HIGH school senior is a very busy person. In addition to keeping up with her final high school courses and perhaps a part-time job, she spends most of the autumn taking admissions tests for college, filling out admissions and financial aid forms, gathering letters of recommendation, applying for scholarships, and maybe even squeezing in a bit of a social life. Before she notices, graduation is past, the summer is over, and she’s off to college. As she becomes accustomed to living on her own, making her own schedule, and choosing her own courses, she realizes that she never really considered why she is going to college and finds herself wondering what on earth she is going to do with the rest of her life.
It’s a pretty familiar scenario to many of us who, despite good grades and test scores and impressive recommendations from our high school years, go off to college with the sneaking suspicion that going off to college is the only thing we’re really qualified to do. Most secondary schools simply are not very good at helping students evaluate their strengths and interests and decide what they want to spend their lives working at. And even when schools do try to help, most teens simply have too much scheduled time and too little space to think seriously and realistically