Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Home-skooled Life: part 1

This is going to be a long blog, maybe even two parts, so I'll just skip my usual nonsense and cut to the chase. You'll notice that I use some "quotation marks" in this blog. Honestly, I'm just tired of the word normal, and I don't actually believe it's relevant to anything, hence the quotes.

There are various diverse ways of homeschooling. I will quickly try to explain the two main types.

School from home: This version is what most people think when they think of home-school. This means that a parent, or tutor, teaches a student, giving them assignments and tests and grades. Basically it is what kids do at school, only at home. School at home people work off a curriculum and cover all the things people do at "normal school".

Unschooling: This version is ever-changing and hard to nail down in a short paragraph. Typically, it means a family who learns through living, with no formal testing, assignments or lessons. Some see it as the most natural way to learn, others see it as child abuse. It is a bit controversial.

It's a varying scale with many subgroups. Mostly I've been somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

The technical process is that you have two choices once you decide to home-school; you can register as a home-schooler with the Ministry of Education ("hey, my kids aren't going to school, hope that's cool with you guys") or you can enroll in a home-school "school". The benefits of the first is that there are no strings attached and you can basically do what you want. The benefits of the second is that they give you money for school supplies and other educational services (music lessons, gym passes, etc.).*

I've been home-schooled my whole life. I went to preschool and after that stayed home with my mom and three sisters.

Homeschooling is difficult to describe because there are so many methods. Even after ten years of it, I'm not an expert. People write books about this stuff--entire books! This is just one short, or long, blog, but I find a lot of people are interested in how it works, so I'm hoping to provide rel event information from my perspective.

The Early Years
When I was younger, I used to use workbooks (for math and English), and worksheets (for science and social studies). I never did book reports, or tests, I just read, learned and lived. It was pretty great.

At times I wished I went to school like a "normal" kid, but my friends wouldn't be able to play because they had homework (which I thought seemed lame), and I got to hang out with my mom and sisters all day, so I never really pushed the school option.

When we moved from Ontario to BC, things changed. There's different standards and regulations here, and soon enough we were signed up at a home-school "school". At said school we had to go in three times a year for "Collaborative Reports". The week before these meetings were some of the most stressful of my elementary school life. We had to run around and get together math worksheets and art, and I wrote my first book report, all so we could show some teacher who sat there and judged us and told us we weren't good enough and we should do more "schoolwork".
I was driven to tears at one of these Reports, but I repressed that memory and forgot all about it until my mom brought it up one time. Yeah, a woman made me cry. I was in grade five and deeply scarred. I've never really liked teachers. I find them controlling, bossy and patronizing, but that's just my limited experience. I'm sure there's great ones out there too, if anything I see on One Tree Hill is true.
The upside of the reports is they give you money to buy school supplies and books. The school also plans field trips and classes, so I learned to play the recorder and had gym class once a week and also did some French lessons which I was terrible at.

In high school things changes. If you "enroll" at a home-school school, you can choose from paper courses, which means you fill out modules and assignments and send them to have them marked (this is what my older sister had been doing lately) or you online courses where you get assignments online and email them back to your "teachers" who give you marks (this is what I've been doing for the past two years).

This is me trying to be brief about homeschooling. I guess it's not easy to be brief about something that's a massive part of your life. Also it doesn't help that the topic is so complicated. I'll answer your all your questions on Sunday. :)

*this is strictly in BC. I'm not sure about other provinces and states, but it's probably about the same.

1 comment:

Sarah said...

I'm homeschooled too! and I agree, its so, so hard and complicated to explain it to people. some of my friends that go to regular school still don't understand it. :)

I miss the early days, when I didn't have to do homework and I could just play around. but now I do the online course thing, where I read the books and stuff and send it in to the teacher. So gone are the days when I can just bum around! :)

wow, long comment, but one more thing: this post is very good at explaining the basics and whatnot of homeschooling. It's much better then what I say:"erm, well, you know, I like read books and then um send in the assignments. er." :)