Who Are These Homeschoolers?
When people hear that kids are homeschooled, they often get this picture in their heads of these sheltered, shy, nonverbal, nonathletic, out of touch kids. While some homeschooled kids may be sheltered, or shy, so are some of the kids that go to private or public school. There were plenty of kids in public school when I grew up that fit that persona. I'm not gonna tell you all homeschoolers are these attentive outgoing kids. We knew plenty of families that homeschooled for religious and other reasons, and certainly, in my mind, didn't do their kids any favors by keeping them out of the "real world". I was from Philly, my kids were going to get "real world" one way or another!
There also weren't many Jewish homeschoolers. We knew another mixed marriage couple that homeschooled their kids as well. We went to cub scouts together (yes, we did other things with other kids too). The mom was a stay at home mom and dad was a computer programmer that worked from home. The son was Josh's age, in fact his name was also Josh. The daughter was a little older and in girl scouts, for which the mother was also very involved. The mom told us that the daughter had Asperger's. I'm not sure if she was "officially" diagnosed or mom diagnosed. She seemed pretty smart, always had a book in her hand, but wasn't necessarily very social with the other kids. These guys didn't get out much. For much of the time we knew them, their Josh's language skills left something to be desired. He was almost unintelligible, but mom did make sure they both got as many scout badges as they could. We also found out that they slept most of the day and were up until the very wee hours of the morning. At one point, they decided to move to Canada. They applied for citizenship, and when they were approved they left. Purchased a house in the middle of nowhere and kind of fell off the face of the Earth. They were a strange family, nice enough people, but strange non-the-less.
In the first blog post, I talk about us being "schooled" during this journey. One of the things we were schooled on was finding out that there were different styles of homeschooling. What? Different styles? No freakin way! People just didn't start schooling their kids by asking them what they wanted to learn today? They weren't just using some kind of religious curriculum or the Bible? Nope, there are actually styles. You have your classical homeschoolers, your eclectic homeschoolers, your unschoolers, the Charlotte Mason method, the computer method, the Montessori method. Some of these are actually child led learning, which I wasn't sure was such a good idea, but apparently for some it worked well. At some point, that I'll talk about in another post, we inadvertently kind of went to child-led learning, but it was mostly because we started to let the kids school on their own. Of course were checking their work, but let's just say they did a lot of "research" on the Internet.
There are other methods of homeschooling as well and some pretty good web sites that explain it, . If you're interested, here are a couple of links:
Also ,there were some homeschooled kids that developed a youtupbe channel with some pretty funny videos on homeschooling myths and realities. They're each about 4 minutes long if you want to take a look.
We met all kinds of people in our homeschool co-op, and for the most part everyone was really nice to each other. We were all in the same boat. We wanted to do some kind of alternative schooling for our kids but also wanted them to have social activities where they could learn and play together. The co-op even had a talent show where Josh got to do his funny, self taught ventriloquist act with his old man dummy Norman. Seth, who had been taking drum lessons and had some pretty good chops at 8 years old, did a drum solo. Both of them got rousing ovations! A lot of people attended and the kids were great! It was a fun little community and we did the co-op thing for a while. They offered home school sports, we'll go into that in a later post too, and just an all around friendly place to be with others in the same situation. This really went unnoticed to the general public, and it wasn't at all what someone would have thought of homeschoolers even at that time.
We would always get questions from people like, "how do you socialize your kids?" How do you teach your own kids? Or "How will they ever get a high school diploma and go to College?" All valid question from those not in the know. We didn't know it all then either, but we figured it out. Socially, our kids also had friends in the neighborhood, although, most of them left a little to be desired in the way of friendship. I grew up in Northeast Philly where there were always kids outside to play with and everyone's mom was your mom too. It's not like that here in the Philadelphia NJ suburbs, kids are certainly more spoiled here and not as welcoming as my friends were. Definitely one of the regrets on moving here, but we made the most of it and found other sources of social activity for the boys to enjoy.