On the current adoption form I am filling out it asks if we plan to homeschool. Check yes or no. I want to check maybe. Homeschooling is something that has interested me for a long time. I know a lot of homeschoolers and the kids are all happy and smart. In fact one girl who was homeschooled (by a working parent, no less!) is starting med school this year.

Homeschooling resonates with me. But I’m scared to bring it up to the husband. I don’t know why. I’m sure he’ll have a reflexive “no way” attitude but all I’ll need to do to convince him otherwise is to remind him of his own school career. Actually both our school careers are totally different but we would both probably have benefited greatly from homeschooling.

The husband:

1. Skipped about 1/3 of high school because he was bored and didn’t see the relavance to his own life.
2. Only graduated from high school because he switched to a school where learning was self-directed.
3. He’s probably ADD (he swears he was tested once and they said he wasn’t) and can’t sit still or have a conversation unless it is about something he’s interested in. This is the same guy who loses track of time and works for hours on things he’s interested in.

Me:

1. I was a high achieving, “gifted” student who was reading before I started kindergarten. I was so bored and miserable in kindergarten that I made myself vomit every morning to try to make my mom think I was too sick to go to school. It didn’t work. I only stopped hating school when I skipped a grade and wasn’t quite so bored.

2. My favorite learning experiences that I remember from school were all self-directed.

3. I remember having a constant level of stress about remembering to take the right book to class and worrying about remembering my clothes on gym days. Did I ever forget? No. I did I worry about it for years? Yes.

The 4-H group I work with here at one point was made up entirely of homeschoolers. It was great! Did we want to meet at 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon for a special activity? No problem. I would love to have that freedom with my kid(s).

I think I have an unschoolingbrain. I don’t do well with a set schedule. I need variety. That’s the reason that I am a travelling vet and not one who works at the same clinic all the time.

I think schooling should be practical. For example, why don’t gym classes teach how to develop a personal fitness program instead of concentrating on team sports that are hard to play after you get out of school? I remember thinking in vet school that anatomy was taught all wrong. You spent your first year blindly memorizing all these parts with minimal practical application. Suddenly there you were learning surgery two years later and it became clear why you needed. We all said that we wished we could go back and take anatomy again once we really had an appreciation. At the same time I always hated whatever kid in school asked, “Why do we need to learn this?” I think all knowledge is useful.

Think what a kid could learn just by cooking. Picking a recipe could lead to tangents on different cultures, making an ingredient list, buying the food (counting money, budgeting, cost comparisons, price per unit), measuring (understanding fractions), cooking (chemistry), etc.

Reading the homeschooling blogs and sites like Life Without School really makes me want to have our future lives include homeschooling. I’m definately going to have to bring it up to the husband.