(no subject)
Nov. 18th, 2021 08:38 ama convo about homeschooling came up in a discord i'm in and i quickly realizing while trying to gather my thoughts about it that it'd be better suited as a long-form post rather than a series of discord messages so i'm gonna write it up here and then link it there ♥
so, i was kind of weirdly hybrid unschooled/homeschooled. tbh i don't know if my mom actually set out to homeschool us For Jesus, but wether or not she did, the homeschooling communities around us were all very "protect our kids from secular influences" so that's the culture i was raised in. my mom also fell in line with it and has her own traumas from it including feeling obligated to stay in her abusive marriage to by bio-dad because of divorce being a sin. again, to this day i don't know how much of that she believed when we started homeschooling and how much of it she picked up just from being immersed in that culture. i went to kindergarten for public school and then was homeschooled 1st-8th grade and one semester of 10th grade.
the only requirements my mom ever had for me were that i do a curriculum math lesson every day, calculadder when i was early elementary, abeka in later elementary, saxon in middle/high school. aside from that i was free to do pretty much whatever i wanted. i read voraciously as a kid and willingly did english curricula stuff because i enjoyed it (rod and staff in early elementary, learning language arts through literature in later elementary/high school, sonlight for that one semester in high school).
i really loved it. i think that method of learning was really good for me. i struggled a lot with the rigidness and routine of public school when i started going (which, now, as a 32yo i'm realizing is because i probably have adhd.) my reading level actually dropped after i started going to public school because 1) i didn't have time to read as much and 2) i had to read books that were accelerated reader program approved to take tests and get points. this also kind of effectively killed my love for reading for a while.
which was part of why i decided i wanted to homeschool again in 10th grade. my mom had realized when i was 13 that my dad's inability to hold down a job meant that she would have to go back to school and work herself if she was going to be able to keep putting food in her five children's mouths. which i was thrilled about being able to make friends and have a social life (i'd always been a bit of an outcast in our homeschool co-op because i like read harry potter, which i only got to do after BEGGING my mom to let me read them because they were considered super satanic in our community). but yeah, academically it wasn't the best for me and i started really resenting having to learn after a life-time of loving it.
i would love to homeschool b if we ever had the chance to. i doubt that, i don't see a future for us in which we don't have to both work full-time to be financially stable. but he's a black boy with two adhd moms who also have other mental illnesses, so the likelihood of him having behavioral/emotional/academic problems is definitely there. and public schools are often not kind to unruly/struggling black boys. this is something britt and i have always known and talked about and started planning our strategy for before he was even born.
right now he's in quaker school -- we're quaker and a lot of the teachers and administrators are close friends who we absolutely trust to be fair and loving towards our son. but he'll probably have to do public school at some point when he's older because i'm not sure we will always be able to afford tuition. we want him to at least start his education there, so he can begin learning in a creative and welcoming and respectful environment (where respect is a two-way street and kids are respected just as much as adults are).
but public school may not be a good fit for him, especially if he ends up being neurodivergent in any way.
there's a sudbury school close to us, it's basically a school for unschooling. the kids all learn together, every grade, and the older kids help teach the younger kids and the younger kids help the older kids with their projects. it's all self-directed project-based learning, with teachers there to oversee the projects and guide the research the kids do. i think if public school ends up not being a good fit for b, we'll end up trying to send him there. the tuition in markedly cheaper than quaker school, so it wouldn't be as hard to afford it.
okay i have to go to work now feel free to ask any q's here or on discord, i do love talking about this stuff xoxoxo
so, i was kind of weirdly hybrid unschooled/homeschooled. tbh i don't know if my mom actually set out to homeschool us For Jesus, but wether or not she did, the homeschooling communities around us were all very "protect our kids from secular influences" so that's the culture i was raised in. my mom also fell in line with it and has her own traumas from it including feeling obligated to stay in her abusive marriage to by bio-dad because of divorce being a sin. again, to this day i don't know how much of that she believed when we started homeschooling and how much of it she picked up just from being immersed in that culture. i went to kindergarten for public school and then was homeschooled 1st-8th grade and one semester of 10th grade.
the only requirements my mom ever had for me were that i do a curriculum math lesson every day, calculadder when i was early elementary, abeka in later elementary, saxon in middle/high school. aside from that i was free to do pretty much whatever i wanted. i read voraciously as a kid and willingly did english curricula stuff because i enjoyed it (rod and staff in early elementary, learning language arts through literature in later elementary/high school, sonlight for that one semester in high school).
i really loved it. i think that method of learning was really good for me. i struggled a lot with the rigidness and routine of public school when i started going (which, now, as a 32yo i'm realizing is because i probably have adhd.) my reading level actually dropped after i started going to public school because 1) i didn't have time to read as much and 2) i had to read books that were accelerated reader program approved to take tests and get points. this also kind of effectively killed my love for reading for a while.
which was part of why i decided i wanted to homeschool again in 10th grade. my mom had realized when i was 13 that my dad's inability to hold down a job meant that she would have to go back to school and work herself if she was going to be able to keep putting food in her five children's mouths. which i was thrilled about being able to make friends and have a social life (i'd always been a bit of an outcast in our homeschool co-op because i like read harry potter, which i only got to do after BEGGING my mom to let me read them because they were considered super satanic in our community). but yeah, academically it wasn't the best for me and i started really resenting having to learn after a life-time of loving it.
i would love to homeschool b if we ever had the chance to. i doubt that, i don't see a future for us in which we don't have to both work full-time to be financially stable. but he's a black boy with two adhd moms who also have other mental illnesses, so the likelihood of him having behavioral/emotional/academic problems is definitely there. and public schools are often not kind to unruly/struggling black boys. this is something britt and i have always known and talked about and started planning our strategy for before he was even born.
right now he's in quaker school -- we're quaker and a lot of the teachers and administrators are close friends who we absolutely trust to be fair and loving towards our son. but he'll probably have to do public school at some point when he's older because i'm not sure we will always be able to afford tuition. we want him to at least start his education there, so he can begin learning in a creative and welcoming and respectful environment (where respect is a two-way street and kids are respected just as much as adults are).
but public school may not be a good fit for him, especially if he ends up being neurodivergent in any way.
there's a sudbury school close to us, it's basically a school for unschooling. the kids all learn together, every grade, and the older kids help teach the younger kids and the younger kids help the older kids with their projects. it's all self-directed project-based learning, with teachers there to oversee the projects and guide the research the kids do. i think if public school ends up not being a good fit for b, we'll end up trying to send him there. the tuition in markedly cheaper than quaker school, so it wouldn't be as hard to afford it.
okay i have to go to work now feel free to ask any q's here or on discord, i do love talking about this stuff xoxoxo