The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [108]
AFTERWORD
By now you’ve been reading and thinking about homeschooling for some time and you find yourself fascinated by the idea. Perhaps you even know a few homeschoolers or have been to a local support group meeting or park day, and you liked what you saw. Perhaps you’ve already decided that homeschooling is definitely the choice for you and your family.
And yet … when you talk to some of your other friends and family, you find yourself downplaying the idea: “We’re thinking seriously about homeschooling, but we’re just taking things day by day. We won’t decide for sure until the time comes.” Or you suffer from the nagging “what ifs?”: What if I can’t find the right materials for my kids? What if we choose the wrong things? What if I don’t like the local school district’s homeschooling program? What if we can’t find a good support group?
What if I make the wrong decision?
What if you do? One of my tasks as editor of a state homeschooling newsletter a few years back was to write a column called “The New Homeschooler.” For one issue I asked experienced homeschoolers what advice they wish they’d had or what one thing they wish they’d known when they first started homeschooling. I asked the question of most homeschoolers I happened to talk to, and I found that the answers fell pretty evenly into two categories: One was “Gee, that’s a hard question. I’ll have to think about it—there’s nothing that turned out to be a major worry.” The other response was “Well, I used to worry about (and here came just about anything: socialization, teaching science, adolescence, what the in-laws think, driver training …), but it turned out not to be a problem at all.”
What we all realized as we thought about this question is that the serious worry we go through when we first start thinking about homeschooling is just like the worry experienced by first-time parents. It’s directly related to the novelty of the experience. Didn’t you worry about dozens of things that turned out to be silly? Things like folding the diapers the wrong way or giving your baby the wrong first vegetable? Weren’t there times you just knew you could permanently warp your baby’s personality by burping her the wrong way or that her funny little sneezes were signs of some dreadful incurable disease?
Eventually you calmed down and began to relax a little. You realized that kids are pretty resilient creatures who can handle their new parents’ learning curves without much trouble. Lots of those decisions turned out to be pretty unimportant, and you can laugh now at how much you used to worry. Homeschooling works the same way. When you first start, there are indeed decisions to make about such things as legal options and learning styles—you have to learn what your choices are and decide what exactly it is that you’re trying to do. But one of the nicest things about homeschooling is that none of your decisions are irrevocable.
Homeschooling is learning by trial and error. If something—scheduling, style, content, whatever—doesn’t work, you are not obligated to stick with it until your kids are eighteen. You can dump everything and start again from scratch if you have to, and in the process you learn to trust your own—and your kids’—judgment. You begin to see just what competent and interesting people your kids are turning into, and you develop some perspective as the homeschooling life comes to seem normal and familiar.
After a year or two of homeschooling, most of us get used to it. We expect that there will always be questions and that figuring out the answers and the new questions arising from those answers is a natural part of the whole process. And perhaps surprisingly, as most of those experienced homeschoolers I talked to testified, that process is tremendous fun. Whatever else changes in what our children learn and how they go about learning it, the delicious sense of fun and adventure continues. May you find that fun and adventure with your own children!
APPENDIX A: HOMESCHOOLING RESOURCES
While homeschooling books can regularly be found in stock