Why I Homeschool #1: Stability

I first started thinking about homeschooling for my future children while I was adjusting to my ninth school, during the third half of my 8^th grade year. Lest you think my ability to grasp fractions is not consistent with what you would expect of a Caltech graduate, let me elaborate.

If you attend school in the northern hemisphere, your school year begins in late summer, during the months of August or September, and ends in late spring, in May or June. If you attend school in the southern hemisphere, your school year begins in late summer, in late January or February, and ends in early summer, in time for a long Christmas break, so you can enjoy the traditional Christmas Day braai (barbecue, only more delicious) and pool party. There is no way of timing an international move between hemispheres in order to seamlessly transition from the end of one school year to the beginning of another. I ran afoul of this hemisphere transition three times.

I started formal schooling in Pretoria, South Africa. I attended Hatfield Primary for about 3 months until the end of the first term. We knew that before our upcoming move to Dallas we would spend some transitional time with my grandparents in Durban, so my parents sent me ahead to live with them and start second term in Durban in the hopes of easing the transition. It might have worked better if I hadn’t picked up head lice at my birthday farewell party the day before I left for Durban, and had to spend the entire first week out of school. I don’t remember if we stayed in Durban long enough to finish that term, but it didn’t matter when we arrived in Dallas – I had recently turned 6, and the fact that I was an early fluent reader whose other passion was math wasn’t enough for them to place me in second grade instead of at the beginning of first grade. I was on my third school, and (because universal kindergarten hadn’t caught on as thoroughly in 1986) many of my classmates had never attended school before.

2 schools later (having switched once because of moving to a new school district and once because of being admitted to a Talented and Gifted program), I finished fifth grade and we moved from Dallas back to South Africa. This time, when we switched hemispheres, the fact that I had been in a gifted program and had won several city-wide math contests and the school spelling bee was enough to advance me to the middle of sixth grade. We lived with my grandparents in Durban while my parents attempted to find jobs in Pretoria (school #6), and then moved to Pretoria once they succeeded (school #7).

The transition from school #5 to school #6 was probably the most shocking for me. The gifted program in Dallas had been a good fit academically, and although I was bullied, I had a best friend I loved. My teacher really cared about me as a person, buying me a gold-colored tiger pin “for good luck” before the Dallas-wide spelling bee and writing thoughtful responses to my journal entries. Segue to school #6: on the first day of school, when the teacher entered the room, the students all rose en masse and chanted in unison, “Good-mor-ning-Mis-ter-Shep-herd.” They remained standing until he told them to sit, which everyone did simultaneously. I honestly wondered if I was on the same planet as I had been a month before. On the second or third day of school was a spelling test. I knew that there would be an extra U in words like colour and neighbour, but didn’t know how many other variations there were until the test returned with TWO words marked wrong which I knew I had spelled correctly. I don’t believe this had ever happened to me before. Jewellery. Manoeuvre. Who knew?  In math, there was the unique beast known as the milliard – Americans recognize it as a billion, but the number South Africans refer to as billion is known in America as a trillion. And answering questions, particularly if you were new and the questions were hard, was a social faux pas, at least if you had been placed in the B class instead of the A class. (I’m not quite sure what the school officials were thinking there). My sense of alienation was profound. I didn’t replicate the mistake of knowing it all too soon in school #7, but making friends was still hard. Fortunately, the differences in math were merely cosmetic and it remained the constant friend it had always been.

School #8 marked the first time in my life I switched schools at the same time as everyone else, transitioning from the end of primary school in Standard 5 (7^th grade) to the beginning of high school in Standard 6 (8^th grade). This may be why I made 4 decent friends. However, I lost respect for most of my teachers, whose relationship with students was a stark contrast to my experience in Dallas. From calling us “mensies” (little people) to publicly (falsely) accusing me of theft as I climbed onto the bus after school, teachers at that school showed they were not to be trusted. The woman who taught my beloved math had less understanding of the subject than I did, and the geography teacher insisted that our solar system was on the left-hand side of the galaxy (see? In the picture?) and wouldn’t listen to my explanation to the contrary. That explanation was “backchat” – an unacceptable expression of disrespect. 8^th grade in South Africa finished and I was entirely disgusted with it, quite happy to escape to a place where most people wrote from right to left because it wouldn’t mean more of the same.

My 9^th school, thank God, was the last – I stayed there 4 and a half years. It was the American Community School of Amman, which meant a return to the American system and way of relating to teachers, though very few of them actually broke through my barriers of distrust. When I heard I was being placed in the middle of 8^th grade, I tried to argue – I FINISHED 8^th grade, for crying out loud! Will that year just not die? – but this way I would be the same age as the other kids, which seems to make the grown ups happy. Time to figure out what the new rules are.

I immediately made a best friend, a year younger than me, in French class. She had been the only girl in the class before my arrival, so it was almost inevitable that we’d hit it off. Katie was an army brat and I believe she had never lived more than 3 years in one place. I had spent 5 years in Dallas, so I was curious about whether her school tally might exceed even mine. It didn’t – she’d only attended 5, if I recall correctly – but that was because she’d been homeschooled for some of her school career. I remember feeling that the very idea was a revelation. Even if I grew up to move around the way my parents had, if I homeschooled, any kids I had wouldn’t have to deal with all those jarring transitions.

There are many more reasons I decided to start, and more reasons I continue, homeschooling my children, which I hope to address in future posts. But at its root I think stability is my biggest “why”, the reason I can’t conceive of any temptation, any life situation, that would make me willing to put any of my children in a brick and mortar school.

This has panned out pretty well. We haven’t moved as much as my parents did, but P14 would be in her 5^th school by now and E13 in his 4^th if we hadn’t been homeschooling. We have used Sonlight Curriculum for history, Bible, and literature every single year since P14 was 3, and although we’ve used other curricula for other subjects, my teaching philosophy and ways of interacting with my children haven’t fundamentally changed. I certainly haven’t switched up spelling rules and math terminology on them! Since they study the same books, my children have a lot in common, not sharing my experience of only really relating to my 2 years younger brother once I hit high school and we started having had the same teachers and classes. All my observations tell me that my children are happier than I was, and I am thankful for the stability homeschooling has offered them.

Do you homeschool your children? What is your biggest "why"? Let me know in the comments!