Could We “Teach Our Children Well”? (Thanks CSN&Y, one of my favorite tunes)

Once the decision is made to homeschool, all these thoughts go running through your head at a million miles an hour. How are we going to do this? What do we know about teaching? How will the kids respond? Will it be hard? WIll I end up hating them? Will they end up hating me? What if they don’t listen? How do we know what to teach? Will it cost us anything? What will everyone think? What if we fail? And the questions go on and on.

All legitimate questions, but many were speculation and all were answerable. Fact of the matter was, my wife and I both had some type of teaching experiences during our careers. Yes, we were teaching adults, but do you think teaching adults is easier than teaching kids? I can tell you it’s not. We understood the basic concepts of teaching and had decent communication skills. I wrote a training program for the optical company I worked for and taught Opticians the technical aspects of optics, eyeglass fitting, dispensing, as well as selling. I went on to teach software to adults in corporate, public, and private settings. My wife trained people at one of her jobs on a new computer system they implemented, and also taught her employees how to help run her business. We understood the fundamentals but did that qualify us as “teachers”? Maybe, only time would tell.

My family includes a number of educators. One of my Aunts was the Principal for a prominent urban public school in Philadelphia. This tiny in stature, 60 year old Jewish women commanded respect and put fear in the eyes of her students. These huge teenagers would quickly pull their hoodies off their heads if they saw her walking down the hall for fear of her wrath. She is tough, honest, and fair.and we had a few discussions about her concerns over our decision. Not too long ago my Aunt told me what a good job we did and that the kids really did turn out pretty great in spite of her early concerns. I’ve loved and respected this woman since I was a small child, i was in her and my Uncle’s wedding when I was five years old. For her to say this and validate our decision took me a little by surprise, but gave me a great deal of satisfaction. It can be done!

So where do we start? My understanding of typical homeschooling, was that it was a Christian family thing. Religious parents didn’t want their kids to be exposed to non-faith based teaching or kids who could influence them in a negative way. Consequently, there were a lot of faith based curriculums out there, but we wanted something more along the lines of a traditional curriculum. Oddly enough, when we asked the school district in our suburb if we could use their books and curriculum, they said we’d have to pay for them. Um, don’t I already pay with 60% of my property taxes?! In any case, we chose not to take them up on that. . errrr. .. . offer. I’ll come back to the district in another post, as the balls on some of these administrators was unreal.

My wife did most of the research, ok, she did all of the research, but we discussed our options together. We decided on a curriculum that was used by the Pennsylvania Virtual Charter Schools that had a pretty good reputation. We did have to pay for it, a couple thousand dollars a year to start, but we did get some help from family. Another note here, if we lived in PA, the curriculum, a computer, and the internet access would be free. Why did I move to the Philadelphia NJ suburb?!

My wife also found a local homeschool co-op. Who knew there was such a thing? We came to find out at the time that there were around two to three thousand homeshcooled kids in NJ and around two million nationwide. The co-op was run by parents, some of whom were teachers. They would put together classes on various subjects, including cooking, and teach them at a church nearby. They did other things together and our kids got to interact with other kids in a non-traditional classroom setting while still being able to school at home in their PJ’s most days.

Things were starting to shape up as we took on this challenge. We had lots of work ahead of us. This certainly was not how we planned things. Our kids were supposed to go to school during the day like everyone else so my wife could run her business and be there if they needed her. I was supposed to go to work everyday, come home and relax and maybe help the kids with their homework or drive them to an activity. We were supposed to join the PTA, go to meetings, support school activities, meet with teachers and otherwise be involved. We didn’t want to be different, but that would be another challenge we’d have to face.