Please share!

As I prepare to begin teaching high school next year, I am reaching out to those homeschool mom friends who have gone before me. Sharon is one such friend. I am thrilled she was willing to share with you about her experience homeschooling high school!

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High school was approaching for my oldest son, and I felt queasy about it. Would I be able to provide him a good education at home during those years? Would we bomb out in our science labs? Would I fail to find curriculum that would get us through this? Was I adequate to the task? And would I screw up his transcript and his whole future?

Despite my many anxieties, I moved forward and homeschooled my three children through 12th grade. In the process, I learned a few things.

My children are funny

I really got a kick out of my children’s sense of humor. One day, my daughter handed in an essay on the original Olympics with a lackluster introduction. I walked her through some ways she could try to capture her audience, and she rewrote the intro. Here’s the hook she came back with: “Did you know that the men in the original Olympics competed NAKED???”

She cracked me up.

My attitude could shape theirs

Civics. Physics. Another round of Egyptian history. A bad day. Too much to do and too much stress. My negative attitude affected my children’s attitudes toward their work and upped the whine factor.

On the other hand, literature, writing, history, a new and fun idea, or exploring the neighboring woods for spring flowers made me happy, and it showed in how my children reacted to it. We truly enjoyed those activities together. Incidentally, they still enjoy them!

My kids’ most potent Bible curriculum was how my husband and I lived our lives

We used devotionals, Bible curriculum, and personal Bible readings in our homeschool, but what my children saw in my husband and me each day had the power to support or cancel out anything they read in the Bible. I tried to be as considerate of them at home as I was in public.

It’s not about the books

I genuinely wish I had learned this earlier than I did. I felt the goal was the facts, the way the material was presented, and the tests because I had spent so much effort studying catalogs and then selecting, paying for, and teaching from those books, This is my biggest regret from those days, and I still feel it almost two decades later!

The books are long gone. Why did I spend so much time focusing on temporary things?

I could be successful

The higher maths. The higher sciences. Labs! I trembled at those words until I found Dr. Jay Wile’s original chemistry course. I’ll show my age here, but when I bought the course, it was printed on three-hole paper that I went home and put in a binder. I loved the conversational tone, and, more important, so did my teens. A very palpable weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

It was vital to me to find a course that made me feel confident enough to teach my teens through high school. The chemistry course opened the door to an “I can do this” attitude.

In some subjects, I was a crappy teacher

Oops. Did I just write “crappy”? So unprofessional of me. Sorry about that. I mean “really crappy.” Geometry was one of those subjects. For my daughter, I found a geometry video with teacher James Noggle from The Teaching Company (now called The Great Courses), and that did the trick. For one son, we signed him up to take geometry at a local Christian school with a stupendous teacher. My husband helped out with some subjects as well.

FYI: If your son is going to dye his big, fluffy hair clown red, just make sure you know about it before he goes to that conservative Christian school tomorrow morning and is sent back home.

They’re under your feet for six years, in your hair for eight, in their bedrooms for four, and then they’re gone

Their exodus left a huge, gaping ache in my life. I felt like a used-up tube of toothpaste. I had poured my life and energies into them, and then, just when they were becoming interesting again, they left home.

Now I’m a grandmother, and I have the grace of a grandmother. I wish I had possessed the grace of a grandmother all those years.

Algebra!

Teaching my children was a second education for me in so many subjects, and I loved that aspect of homeschooling.

I am not brave

Creative, yes. Brave, no. Well, there was that time I ordered soup from an Argentinian restaurant in town. What came was a bowl containing things that should have been swimming in an aquarium. And then there was the time I was alone in Boston with a toddler and two young boys, and we traveled the subway system (a new experience!) to walk the Freedom Trail, but, returning, I couldn’t remember the station where I’d parked my car.

I am a hypocrite

I am an advocate for homeschooling at home rather than outsourcing so many classes that I feel inadequate to teach. Yet I loved to teach so much that I formed an Indiana history club twice, complete with field trips, and I developed literature classes for local junior and senior high students. Moms had to drive their students to my house or the library for these classes. What can I say?

I needed fellow travelers

Our family always belonged to a homeschool group or co-op. This is different from outsourcing. It is held in one location and one day a week or month. If I could not find a homeschool group, I established one. The field trips, activities such as science fair night, and people enriched our lives. The personal friendships, advice on teaching and curriculum, and the safe place for my young children were invaluable to me and made the load lighter.

Homeschooling can be done in the bleakest of personal times

I’ve homeschooled on one income, no income, in the midst of packing and moving, and while recovering from traumas, deaths, and operations. Some events slowed the pace of our homeschool. Some put it on pause.

I may not be “excellent” or perfect, but I am adequate

By “adequate,” I don’t mean “mediocre” but “sufficient for the task of homeschooling.” After all, I knew my children best. I loved them most. I cared about their futures, their emotional health, and their spiritual lives more than anyone else on earth did. I prayed often and leaned on God continually. I asked for advice. I learned from wonderful teachers. I considered homeschooling as my job.

When my second son graduated, I told him I wanted him to give a speech at our private ceremony for him. He was shy-ish, so that was a problem. I said something mature like, “Look, I’ve just spent twelve years teaching you. The least you can do is give me a graduation speech.”

In his speech—and, yes, I did cry—he thanked me for homeschooling him and revealed that had he gone to a school, he would have been lost. And I knew what he meant. For one, no one would have taught him in the particular ways he learned, so he would have been lost in a confusing institutional system. Oh, he would have learned things, things like “I am stupid,” which he definitely is not. For another, he knew his spiritual life would have been

Really, his words “would have been lost” encompassed so many things, more than I can mention here, but I acknowledge the truth of them.

Turns out, all my anxieties about homeschooling high school were unnecessary. I needn’t have worried. None of those fears came true. Best of all, God was gracious to help me find a solution to each problem every time I asked.

And I pray the same will be true for you as well.