JCecil asked me to write a bit about how I was led to homeschooling and how I “socialized” my kids.
Calvin, my oldest was a summer baby. He was born right in the middle of July. When he was about 4-years-old, I tried to do little workbooks and things with him and he would have none of it!! He did however, love to have stories read to him and would get to the point where he could memorize little story books. He even had his dad convinced that he was reading!!! He also loved to be sung to and Mr. Pete would sing to him every night. So there were some signs that he was ready for kindergarten but other signs that maybe he was a tad too immature yet.
Now, there was a family at my church that I didn’t know at all, but I saw them every week and I had a lot of respect for them. First of all, it was a large family, about 5 kids, and all of them had red hair – so they were hard to miss!! But mostly they sat in church with such reverence and the kids were so well behaved. I felt that either these parents were incredibly lucky or they had this parenting thing down right. So at a church picnic I struck up a conversation with the dad about kids and stuff. I was thrilled to find out that one of their boys was my child’s age and I was thinking that maybe I could have them know each other so that when Calvin started school in the parish, he would already have a little friend. I was absolutely floored when the dad said that his kids didn’t go to the parish school. They were homeschooled!!
I think I probably sat there with my mouth open for a good minute. I had never even heard of homeschooling before and here was a family I had admired that was actually schooling their own kids at home. I had tons of questions, first and foremost being, “Is that legal?”
The father graciously went through his well rehearsed spiel about homeschooling, the legalities etc.
The rest of the day I thought about what he said, but I was still doubtful. I had plans for myself when Calvin went to school! I was going to get more clients, and build a bigger business, and go back to college, and fix up the house. Plus what about all the happy memories I had from school of making friends, and playing kickball, birthday parties etc. I didn’t want him to miss out on all that. So I made up my mind that homeschooling was silly and I was going to enroll him for the fall.
Now this is where it gets a little weird. After never hearing before about homeshoooling, I was suddenly hearing about it all the time. I turned on the radio and there would be an interview with someone about homeschooling. I went to get my hair cut and there would be a magazine article about homeschooling. It got to be rather uncanny.
In the meantime I started to rule out Calvin going to the local public school. For one thing, he definitely would be the minority kid. We live in a predominantly African American neighborhood and even though he played nicely with the neighborhood kids, whenever someone new came to visit they would start in on Calvin and his little friends would just let them. I couldn’t see sending him to school just to be harrassed everyday. I wasn’t overly impressed with the behavior of these neighbor kids either. There wasn’t a fluid reader in the bunch either which increased my doubts.
The realities of tuition payments to the parish school were also starting to make me question if that is really what I wanted to do. I remembered that although I had a blast in school, I came very close to losing my faith there, particularly in high school. The parents and kids at the parish school didn’t strike me as being particularly religious and the school halls had the same feel as the public school. I didn’t get a different “Catholic” feel when I was in there.
So I started to really struggle with what I was going to do with this kid when he turned 5 in the fall. In the meantime these subtle hints about homeschooling kept finding me and I started thinking about it more and more.
Finally that summer, I took Calvin to see our pediatrician. I had known him for quite a few years and had even worked with him before Calvin was born. So I asked his opinion of what he thought I should do for Calvin’s schooling. Interestingly he suggested that because Calvin was a young 5, and a boy, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to hold him back a year and let him mature and get ready for school a little more. But then he said, “But I’m a homeschooler so my ideas might sound a little wacky.”
I was stunned. I had no idea he homeschooled!! He never talked about it before. He calmly went back to his desk and brought me pamphlets and information about the state homeschool convention and articles about homeschooling.
After thinking about it a while I began to wonder if maybe God was trying to tell me something. Was He trying to lead me somewhere I had never intended to go? I was going from never hearing of homeschooling, to being skeptical of it, to considering it!!
I signed up to go to the state homeschooling convention. Now I pictured maybe 30 people in someone’s backyard talking about library books. Boy was I surprised! There were hundreds of people in a convention center that featured REAL book vendors and homeschool curriculum dealers. I couldn’t believe all of the choices.
My other surprise was the spiritual feeling in this convention center. This was a Christian Homeschooling convention, probably 99.8% protestant. But their open love for tHE Lord, the way they spoke about God and about Jesus, and the way they brought Jesus into their everyday life was just inspiring. I hadn’t experienced anything like that since the Eucharist Convention of 1976 when I was a teenager. If this is what homeschooling was all about then I wanted it and I wanted it for my family!
And that’s how we started.
More to come.
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