By: Jessica Wright
In my entire academic career, I can only remember playing sick once. I was that kid who would rather go to pre-algebra than stay home sick. Learning is fun! And you can only watch so much Disney before even an eleven-year-old is ready to scream of boredom. That in mind, when I did play sick, Mom knew something was wrong. It simply didn’t happen. I was tired of the public school system and being treated like an inmate instead of a student. Public school kids can easily become drones, moving through the motions with little passion and following the set order of things for fear of punishment rather than a desire to actually excel. I wasn’t a drone, and it was beginning to cause problems.
The day my mom got an offer for her first job in seven years, I told her I wanted to be homeschooled. Now we had a choice: homeschool or two incomes. We changed our entire lifestyle to support a change of education styles. The following year both my siblings started homeschooling as well. For us, it worked. For others I’ve met, it doesn’t work so well. Despite its rise in popularity, I’ve found that many people still don’t know much about homeschooling in general, so I thought I’d give an insider’s view on three benefits of homeschooling.
The average public school student spends about 7 hours at school just doing lessons, then another 2-3 on homework afterward (on a good night). Add to that the fact that most participate in after-school activities and there isn’t much time left to do things with family or friends. I have never spent more than 6 hours in one day on homeschooling. That’s with lessons and homework combined, sometimes multiple lessons per subject, and I took more than 7 classes each semester through high school. What an incredible difference! This freedom allowed my mom and I to visit museums, parks, learning centers, or whatever else we needed or wanted to do that day.
That same flexibility also worked for family vacation time. There are now no family vacations taken on Labor Day Weekend. Ever. We aren’t bound by state mandated schedules (or anything for that matter), so our trips were taken whenever we wanted. That also meant that if we wanted a Friday off to go to someone’s house, we just did extra lessons earlier in the week. This flexibility became one of the biggest blessings our family could ask for.
Homeschooling also provided us with educational opportunities that I may not have received as a public school student. For example, Delta College has many programs for high school-aged students that allow them to homeschool and take college classes at the same time. My brother is working through a local high school so he can take college classes for free. Homeschooling also means that each student is automatically Valedictorian. My Valedictorian status lead to my receiving a scholarship that I may not have had otherwise.
There were other educational opportunities provided by the home education process that I greatly appreciated. For example: the ability to learn whatever I wanted. Again: flexibility. Michigan is one of the top ten freest states for homeschoolers. There are no regulations set for curriculum, thereby allowing students to learn what they need to at the pace that suits them best. For my family, that meant I was able to study Physics while my sister took Chemistry. I graduated with enough credits for two students and a high GPA because my mom and I controlled how quickly I went through things. Because of that, I was able to keep my grades up in areas of difficulty, like math. If you want to homeschool, you’re in the right state.
The last benefit, though by no means the least valuable, is connections. The most common assumption I hear about homeschooling is that people expect the kids to be unsocialized. Actually, if you Google the word “unsocialized” one of the first few results is about homeschoolers. This is one of the biggest myths about homeschoolers out there. Even my grandma still buys into it after we’ve been homeschooling for 10 years. Honestly, I made more and better friends homeschooling than I ever would have at public school. There are co-ops, sports, clubs, teams, events, etc. made up of homeschoolers. And many of those groups can lead to scholarships as well. I competed in art contests, my sister and I joined a writing group, and my brother is on the local soccer team. My point is that there are always opportunities to connect with other people who are doing the same things as you. And because they’re homeschooled, you can be fairly certain that if they are participating, it’s because they are interested and not because they are being forced or pressured into it.
Homeschooling is not without its difficulties. There are things I know now that I wish I had known four years ago which would have made my life a lot easier, like dual-enrollment and local teams. But homeschooling prepared me for many aspects of life that public school never could, and I would greatly encourage anyone thinking about a change in education styles to look into their options.
For more information about homeschooling, visit www.hslda.org.