My Homeschool Story

Posted by Aubrey Lively | 0 comments

I was homeschooled as a child.  My mother taught me to read, count, and add.  She got a copy of the school district’s kindergarten goals and dutifully worked through the list with me, insisting on finger painting even when both of us preferred our fingers to be clean.

I remember this time with my mother sweetly, although I did not love all of her lesson plans. Outlining the continents with a straight pin until I knew them turned out to be as futile as it felt.  Memorizing my math facts was something I couldn’t understand: I thought it was about “performance” instead of quick recall of facts.

But we stood in the kitchen together, stirring pots, baking brownies, saying Scriptures, and chasing after Tuesday, the one day of the week I could never seem to remember.  I had been in daycare before this, and it was wonderful to be at home at last, with someone who understood me because on some level, her mind worked like mine did.  And when it didn’t?  She had a level of respect for letting me work things out in my own way, like being given space to be myself.

I started public school when I was five, already done with kindergarten.  Red tape and bureaucracy were the highlights of that year, being tested, being sent back and forth between school, home, first grade, kindergarten, and the principal’s office.

It was 1985, and the homeschooling laws were fuzzy at best.  Mom caved to pressure from the school district, and I went to first grade, where we were learning to read, then to second grade which was deemed a “review year,” and on to third, in which I was graded on the number of math problems I fit into a row instead of the results of the math problems.

One could easily doubt the significance of the few months of official homeschooling that I’d experienced. After all, most children learn something from their parents before attending school.  Those few months, though, set the tone for the rest of my educational experiences.  Because of those few months of homeschooling before I turned five, I spent the rest of my life planning to homeschool my own children, waiting for the moment when my own wings would be free again to simply learn, unfettered.

My second grade teacher told us that renaissance men were extinct with the Renaissance: “There is too much information now to know everything,” she said, as we sat through that “review” year in which nothing new was learned at all.  I quietly slipped inside myself, to hibernate until I had children.

I was homeschooled again my sophomore year in high school.  The private school I’d been attending had had a change in management, and I’d been lost in the shuffle.  The school went from K-12 to K-7.  I was in 10th grade.  Instead of sending me away, though, I took Bible and computer classes with 7th graders and completed PACES for history and math.  Six months into the year, however, the school still had not ordered an English class for me, and it began to seem that they would not do so.

My mother homeschooled me again.  At first, it was just for this English class.  By then, she was a single parent, so she spent her evenings skimming through a novel.  We didn’t own a lot of fiction, so I was sentenced to Great Expectations. . To this day, I can’t stand Dickens

English was Mom’s weakest subject, so she told me to read the novel and define the words she’d listed.  It was awful.  She thought so, too, and she let me come home at the Christmas break.  I did all of my classes with PACES at home alone.  It was not ideal, but I could check the arbitrary boxes off of a required list and move on to things I was interested in.  I spent my days reading about missionaries, babysitting for my youth pastor, and still dreaming about a time when I could homeschool my own children, with the freedom and creativity I’d known before my parents divorced, before PACES and homework and bureaucracy.

I was not homeschooled in the traditional sense of the word, but I was given the heart of a homeschooler by someone who began growing the dream for me before I could carry it myself.  And in the end, it has been the beauty and joy of homeschooling that has stuck more than the less fondly remembered public schooling.

Aubrey Lively is a homeschooling mother of four, ages 9, 7, 3, and 2. She has a BA in Literature and an MEd in Teaching and is currently surviving seminary with her husband of ten years. Visit Aubrey online at http://aubreylively.blogspot.com.