Who Should Homeschool

The same woman who made the Shake­speare com­ment has a very dif­fer­ent view of home­school­ing than I do.

This lady (who was real­ly very nice) home­schooled one of her sons one school year, but it was­n’t by choice. He’d been kicked out of pub­lic school for major dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lems and they could­n’t afford a decent pri­vate school. She said it was a hor­ri­ble year and both of them were glad when it was over, and that it affect­ed their rela­tion­ship bad­ly. She seemed to think that I’m some sort of mar­tyr to want to do this year after year.

I enjoy being with Katie so much. It’s won­der­ful. She is a very cool and inter­est­ing per­son. I learn about things that I would nev­er have inves­ti­gat­ed if it weren’t for her. I’m get­ting a much bet­ter edu­ca­tion now than I did when I was in school!

And I guess it’s a mat­ter of atti­tude, or maybe it’s relat­ed to the per­son­al­i­ties of the kids and par­ents involved, or the fam­i­ly sit­u­a­tions, or some­thing. Because this is a woman who (with her hus­band) adopt­ed five trou­bled sib­lings after they’d been bounced around through fos­ter homes all over the state for years and years. I could­n’t do that. I don’t think I have it in me.

She is obvi­ous­ly a very devot­ed, car­ing, involved parent—but home­school­ing was not good for them. Of course, it was­n’t a choice, but a neces­si­ty, which was prob­a­bly anoth­er big factor.

But yeah, it isn’t for everyone.

Oh—I think she near­ly had heart fail­ure when she learned that I don’t have a degree. Any degree. Not even an asso­ci­ate’s. She has sev­er­al grad­u­ate degrees. But she’d just had a con­ver­sa­tion with Katie that ranged from Shake­speare to word prob­lems to the lex­i­grams used to com­mu­ni­cate with some Bonobo chimps. She asked a lot of ques­tions about dif­fer­ent sub­jects and how I planned to deal with, for instance, chem­istry and physics, and seemed sat­is­fied. I could actu­al­ly see the gears whizzing in her head, revis­ing at least some of her notions about the rela­tion­ship of degrees to education.

We had these con­ver­sa­tions because our daugh­ters were in a peer sup­port group togeth­er, and we were all in the wait­ing room for about 20 min­utes before it began, then it was just the adults dur­ing the hour+ time for the group.