Homeschooling is better than a poke in the eye.

When we first began to homeschool I was so motivated, so excited--so young.  I guess I had to be pretty driven to even get started with homeschooling.  To find out about it I had to go to the library and seek out an old article I had once seen in the Tribune on microfiche.  We had no internet then.  And homeschoolers were not so common. 

We were broke in those days. I used to make my own worksheets.  I mean I wrote them out by hand --no copy machine, no computer even.  I can recall hand-drawing enlarged pictures of ants, copied from a library book, with lines pointing to their various body parts, connected to blanks for the kids to fill in. 

We went on nature walks, collected leaves, pressed them in waxed paper--all that good stuff.  We did "hands-on" learning, made sugar-cube castles, mobiles, staged plays, took lots of field trips.  We went to hippie-homeschool conventions and camp-outs...  Those were our pre-Christian homeschooler days.  Our comrades were unschoolers and all sorts of creative types with widely varied approaches.  By and large that group was pretty laid-back, and a lot of fun. 

How did we even get into homeschooling?  Well, we had managed to buy our first house in a pretty bad neighborhood, and the school was kind of rough, I mean, it was an elementary school. My oldest son went through kindergarten there and had a pretty good teacher (although I got called many days to come get him because he had "headaches," which I think were from boredom).

But the next year that teacher left, and my second son got the new young teacher, who had no patience for little kids.  And all the cool stuff--the artwork, rice table, books, puzzles, colorful learning stations that my oldest son had enjoyed--had all gone with the old teacher.  The room seriously looked like the Whos' house after the Grinch had stolen Christmas.  Like with a wire hanging from a nail on the bare wall.  And it was gray.

There was also the first day of school that year, when I looked at my little first-grade son, and he was SO small...and it just freaked me out that he was going to have to sit at a desk all day...like a little man going off to work...and he was just SO young.  And then my second son going too, my baby, to that dismal place, leaving me...alone.  I felt like the government was stealing my children.  And after I dropped them off I went home, sat on my couch, and cried.

I had other reasons for pulling them out.  For one thing, there wasn't even any playground equipment at the school.  At least we had a swingset.  Also, my oldest son's headaches and boredom continued.  I was sure my younger son had very high intelligence but his teacher just noticed that he was "not very good with scissors," which turned out rather ironically if you know my Tim.

Anyway, there was no use trying to get them into a private school--they were all booked up.  So, off to the library I went, and the journey began--which was supposed to be a temporary solution, by the way.  We put our house on the market 11 months after moving in, not appreciating the bullets and stray dogs bouncing around the neighborhood.  Not to mention the robberies, prostitution, murders... Let's just say we bought an education.  But the plan was to homeschool until we got out of there and moved to a "decent" neighborhood.

Well, you know how that goes... It took us 2 1/2 years to sell and by that time we were so into homeschooling that we could never go back.  Both of my oldest sons homeschooled through highschool, have graduated college, and are off living their lives.  I wouldn't trade one second I had with them. 

My husband and I became Christians in 1995, and decided that we had made a mistake not having more kids.  So, it took a while, but here we are twenty-three years later (after starting homeschooling) and I have a fifth-grader and another first-grader.  The only school they've ever known is at home.  I started out this post feeling really burnt-out and old and tired.  But remembering all that has made me glad.  It's all worth it in the end.