Homeschooling is not for everyone.
I’ll be the first one to say that. I’ve met many people who’ve been awesome at the free-form of homeschooling, and I’ve met those that claimed to be homeschool drop-outs because they realized the strict structure of public or private school was what they needed. The goal is to get a quality education.
I thought I might take a moment to share some life skills that I obtained by choosing homeschooling. I say “choose” there because I did attend school for a year and hated it. I basically begged my mom to take me back into her homeschooling. Thankfully, she did.
1. Homeschooling taught me how to manage my time. Granted while I was young, my mom told me how my schedule was going to go, but as I grew older, she started to only tell me what needed to be completed. It was up to me to get it done in a timely way.
2. Homeschooling helped me work on communication skills with adults as well as peers. My parents thought it important that my siblings and I participate in a lot of extracurricular activities, which meant a lot of time interacting with other adults. Sometimes I felt more adept at speaking with adults than with kids my own age.
3. Homeschooling showed me the importance of intentionality. If I wanted friends, I had to find them outside of my day-to-day education. This meant planning time to hang out with friends after school, on Sunday afternoons, and doing community activities. I was far from friend deprived!
4. Homeschooling created a deep family bond. My siblings became my best friends with the fireworks of disagreements and the giggles of play time. We had each other’s backs, and even as adults today, that bond is still strong.
5. Homeschooling handed me the tools for learning. I couldn’t expect to always be fed all my learning by rote, and sometimes my teacher didn’t know the answer. I had to seek out the answers myself, knowing how to ask questions to find the right answers.
When I started college, many people wondered at my transition from homeschooling to the classroom setting. Was it hard? Did you struggle being in a classroom?
For me, the hardest part was adjusting my thinking to include the idea of classroom time and homework time. Class time seemed a time waste! In homeschool, it was all homework. But honestly, the above list really helped me to transition well to the college world. I already knew how to manage my time, and I knew how to seek out new information if something was missing for me. Homeschooling allowed me to sample the real world while still being a student, to incorporate the have-tos with the want-tos.
What About You?
Are you a homeschooler or do you believe strongly in the school education system? Have a particular homeschooling question? Tell me in the comments below!
Leave a Reply