And We're Off!!

As we got closer to the new school year with Josh starting first grade, we ordered our curriculum and signed up on their web site. This let us keep track of grades, get support when needed, and use the tools they offered. Many of the teachers I know would ask, "What makes you qualified to teach school? I went through years of school and training, why will you be better than me?" I really didn't think much about that at the time but if I could answer them today I would say. . . "Nothing! I'm probably not better than you, but I won't have a classroom full of kids, I'll just have mine."

I mean, I've been through school (although I wasn't a particularly good student, which changed once I got to college), I've educated my customers, I'm not a complete idiot. However, when it came down to technique and lesson plans, the curriculum did it all for us.

Everything was planned out. We got teacher guides that walked us through lessons step by step and provided sound proven teaching techniques. Science lessons and experiments were all accounted for again, in step by step instructions. Music came with CD's and percussion instruments (which I think we hid at first, or at least I wanted to!) Every course had a teachers guides and student workbooks, and/or we could do everything online at their web site. Each lesson had a test at the end, if the students didn't get 80% we had to go through the lesson again until they passed. There was plenty of lessons to go through a whole school year, but we supplemented with other things too.

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia had homeschool classes. Josh got to take a multi-week course on mummies. At the end of the course he got to bring home a mummy he made (I don't want to know what he mummified). We had the homeschool co-op, we had farms to go to, and plenty of adventures. That was the true flexibility of homeschooling, and it would break up the monotony of lessons every day. We tried to do things a little different but also tried to keep some kind of regimen.

Was it easy? Absolutely not! However, for the most part we could maximize what we had and take advantage of the curriculum to the best of our abilities. It could certainly be frustrating at times. Remember, my wife was still trying to run a business from home. She did have some help, and we could be flexible with the school hours, but the kids didn't always want to cooperate. Sometimes, we didn't want to cooperate.

One day we got this letter from the local school district. They wanted information on how we were schooling Josh. They wanted to know what curriculum we were using. They wanted us to keep an attendance record for them so they knew how many school days we were doing. They wanted a whole lot of information for an organization that wasn't going to be teaching our kids. Luckily, someone referred us to the Home School Legal Defense Association (https://hslda.org/content/). They told us in no uncertain terms that we did NOT need to provide the school district with any of that information. We weren't using their curriculum or any of their district resources. Essentially, we were our own private school and they were NOT entitled to any of that information. So we never answered the inquiry and never heard about it again. Even when we started schooling Seth after pre-school, he never actually entered their system so they didn't even know he existed.

This was the start of a long journey. There was happiness and tears, frustration and pure joy. As you'll see while reading, it was a roller coaster ride with ups and downs and cliffs and dips and all kinds of twists and turns. We found out a lot about ourselves. We were definitely "schooled". My wife and I were talking about this the other night and one of the huge benefits to homeschooling was we got to spend more time with our kids than most parents do. We got to raise them and see them grow into the young men they are today.