The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [107]
Most homeschoolers will work out some combination of activities—a part-time job, a volunteer position with a local nonprofit organization, some independent reading and study, maybe a few short trips exploring other areas—rather than concentrating solely on one option. The particulars will depend, as always, on each situation: interests, abilities, finances, family support, readiness to try something completely new. Take a look at some examples:
Mae Shell, of Vermont, volunteered at her local library while taking a few community college classes. She was asked to work as a temporary replacement for an injured librarian and gradually increased to six volunteer and nine paid hours of work. She decided to discontinue the college classes to concentrate on working at the library and developing her own writing.
Jacob Spicer, after a various jobs helping his father, a theater manager, left his rural home for Chicago at age sixteen. He worked at a copy shop, as a waiter and later as a catering manager in a restaurant, and then in a carpentry shop, where he eventually became foreman. He began taking college classes part-time and is thinking about pursuing a law degree.
Indira Curry took a computer repair class at fifteen, because of which she was hired for a summer NASA internship. She was asked to continue at NASA during the next year, and NASA eventually awarded her a full scholarship. She attended college studying architectural engineering.
Raised reading historical fiction, at seventeen Kim Kopel found a volunteer internship at a living history museum. She paid for her expenses with a variety of part-time jobs. In the magazine Growing Without Schooling issue 99 she wrote that the experience gave her the confidence that she can do whatever she sets her mind to.
Britt Barker traveled on her own at age sixteen, working with naturalists in Canada and Europe, and wrote a series of newspaper columns about her travels (since collected into a book, Letters Home). Her younger sister Maggie’s interest in sled dogs grew into training and racing sled dogs competitively.
Damian Lester, sixteen, planned a seven-week train trip to visit family and friends along the Pacific coast. During his trip, he developed an interest in sewing and taught himself to make custom clothing without patterns.
Eleadari Acheson considers her jobs, at a used bookstore and as a gymnastics coach, the most important part of her homeschooling education.
Grace Llewellyn’s books, especially Real Lives, include detailed stories of teen homeschoolers’ experiences. Also, Growing Without Schooling frequently features letters from older homeschoolers about the choices they make as they move from home out into the world.
Finishing Up
For homeschoolers, the line between youth and adulthood is much fuzzier than for their schooled peers. There are often fewer of the formal milestones to mark the transition—they bypass the cap and gown, the prom, and the commencement exercises. Most homeschoolers spend much of their teens stepping gradually into adult responsibilities. Rather than being suddenly on their own, they develop their independence bit by bit, rather like infants freeing themselves from dependence on their parents. They begin to explore the world on their own wobbly feet, checking occasionally to see that their support is still there but enchanted with the new big world to explore.
In a very real sense, though, homeschooling is never finished. One reason homeschooling parents as well as kids so often identify themselves as homeschoolers is that homeschooling is insidious and infectious. We parents watch our kids become voracious learners, and we find ourselves taking the same approach to life: asking questions, finding new ideas and new projects, looking at how things can be different or better. We realize that homeschooling truly is never finished and that each of us is once a homeschooler, always a homeschooler.