Homeschooling high school

The truth is, we never intended to homeschool our kids long-term. Homeschooling was, for us, a reactive decision, not a proactive one, and it was made totally on the fly when Mary Hannah approached what was to be her kindergarten year. We happened to live in a really cruddy school district. We happened to be completely unable to afford private or parochial school. And we happened to be moving just weeks into the school year.

So, homeschooling it was.

We’d already sampled a bit of the homeschooling lifestyle. Since the day we’d brought our first child home, we’d been the sort of parents who explained everything (probably a little too much) and who shared our somewhat obsessive love of books and learning with our children. Mary Hannah had actually been in preschool for a couple of years when we realized how utterly silly it was to pay someone else to glue dry macaroni noodles onto cutout construction paper Ms with our offspring– especially seeing as how we had the whole “socialization thing” pretty much in hand with a near-constant play date thanks to some really amazing friends. So Mary Hannah came home and got the glue sticks all to herself, and even more time to socialize. She thought that was a pretty awesome deal all in all.

We went into homeschooling that first year with something of a “taste and see” approach. Christopher, who comes from a family line rich with professional educators, was pretty sure that while a year or two wouldn’t exactly hurt our kids, it wasn’t a long-term plan. There were, in those days, relatively few examples of graduated homeschoolers to point to in measuring the academic success of the whole venture. And, lest we forget, my husband was not Christian. So his motivation in pursuing home education was strictly secular, and decidedly in the direction of “I want her to get into the best college possible and make a decent living, and I want her schooling to ensure that.”

My heart was in a somewhat different place. Although I had become a mother with only the faintest idea of what I wanted the vocation to look like in my life, I had fully embraced my role, and, in fact, been empowered by it. I had realized that I was far more capable than I had ever imagined when it came to knowing and loving my children– that my instincts were to be trusted, that I was not just important, but vital to these small people. I had taught them to walk, to hold a fork, to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and to share their toys. Most importantly, I had grasped that God was at the center of all of this daily magic and mystery, and that it was my job to pass on this truth.

With that as our starting point, we officially began in August of 2002. It was an auspicious beginning, complete with sharpened pencils and science worksheets. I remember, on that first day, finishing up in under two hours and thinking, “Huh. That wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought.”

Of course, there have been hard days along the way. There have been days when I have sent my husband text messages threatening to enroll children in the nearest public school. There have been days when I have felt my patience slipping and literally gotten up from the table and walked away mid-lesson. There have been days when I have wondered if I got it all wrong– if homeschooling is not only a bad idea, but quite possibly the worst idea I have ever had.

And yet, we have persevered. We have continued on for these past eleven years because it became glaringly obvious even early on that, for our family, homeschooling is the right choice. Despite the occasional bump, the inevitable hiccup, homeschooling has continued to bear fruit in our lives–and by “our lives” I mean mine and my husband’s. And our children’s too, of course.

Part of that fruit is evident in our oldest two homeschoolers, Mary Hannah (16) and Mathaus (13). Years ago, when we first began, I would have loved to have had the opportunity to sit down with some real, live, homeschooled teens and their parents to get an idea of what their lives were like. Did they hate being homeschooled? Did they feel they missed out? What did they study? How did they handle things like tests? What about college? Did they have any friends?

As it turns out, the answers look far different than I imagined they would back then. And they’re different for each of my children– which makes sense, considering that they’re such different people. And therein lies the beauty. Homeschooling has allowed us the unparalleled opportunity to customize an education to fit each of them, to focus on their strengths, hone their interests, and push the boundaries of the subjects they are less inclined to love.

Mary Hannah is a junior this year. She’s spent the last year wading through college-level biology and physiology in pursuit of her goal of becoming a direct-entry midwife. Her first step (which she was able to research and plot out on her own) was to become a DONA-certified doula. While she’s still finishing up some of the traditional high school courses (such as her nemesis, Algebra), the main focus of her studies has been on human anatomy, epidemiology, and human growth and development. It’s a trajectory that a traditional high school never would have afforded her the luxury of following. Poring over World Health Organization growth charts for breast-fed infants doesn’t really fit into the block schedules on most campuses, oddly enough. The sources for these studies has been varied, and has given us a new appreciation for the wealth of resources at the homeschooler’s disposal. Mary Hannah has sat in a classroom shoulder-to-shoulder with twenty-somethings on the campus of Bastyr University. She has accessed online courses. She has read volume upon volume of case studies and instructional texts. She has interviewed women, attended a birth, and researched specific conditions of her own volition. In educationese, Mary Hannah has engaged in a multi-faceted, sustained, time-on-task identification and exploration of a potential career path. And she’s loving it.

Far from being a one-trick pony, Mary Hannah has also spent a large chunk of her year studying French. Christopher taught her for several years, right up until he exhausted his knowledge bank. Seeing as how he had three years of high school French and two years in college, it was a fairly decent repository en francais. (Which may mean nothing, seeing as how I took German and have no idea what I just said.) This year, we looked into CurrClick Live‘s online, interactive language offerings and have been absolutely delighted with Mr. G’s French classes. Mary Hannah will be starting French 6 next month, and continues to bombard me daily with all kinds of dialogue that sounds lovely but means less than nothing to me. Mr. G gave her an A last semester, so I can only assume that she’s doing right by the French speakers of the world.

Another area of interest for our high school junior is music. Mary Hannah plays guitar (quite well, as it turns out) and invests a reasonable bit of time into music theory, composing, and practice. A CurrClick class on theory and Jean Welles‘ dvd instruction have been great at keeping her moving forward. Art has been another big area of growth for her this year. This has been a self-guided study, with no formal parameters, but lots of experimentation and discovery. In other words– the very best kind of art class. And, oh yeah– she sells designs, sews, and sells handmade items to benefit our nonprofit. I think we call that  “home ec.,” and “entrepreneurial education.”

Mathaus isn’t technically a high schooler (he’d be in 8th grade in a public school), but he might as well be. The base of his studies this year are being formed by Sonlight’sCore 200, a course written for approximately the 10th grade. In addition, he’s learning HTML programming, digging into his love of film, working on Algebra, and tackling a genre study-based literature course that I wrote to drag him, kicking and screaming, away from SciFi twaddle books. He’s also interested in music, and took the CurrClick Music Theory class with his sister. And he’s taking Biology. And he spends probably two hours a day– like his older sister– working on original fiction. And he built our new dining room table with his dad. Doesn’t sound much like my last year of middle school.

All of this to say that yes, homeschooling high school is possible. It’s somehow even more rewarding, even more fun than teaching little ones to read. It wasn’t our plan in the beginning, but oh, I am so glad we stayed the course.

And the answers to those questions? The ones about missing out, about regret, about friends? Well, Mary Hannah and Mathaus have agreed to address those concerns in an upcoming blog post. You’ll just have to wait until they have time in their delight-directed schedules to sit down at a keyboard and share their thoughts.