Dana at Principled Discovery asks, “What does homeschooling mean to you”? Her article centers on whether or not homeschooling is normal and to what degree. Normalcy however has bearing on what homeschooling means to me.
I cannot remember a time in my life when I aspired to or pretended to be normal. That is except for those conversations with my mother where she would say that of her nine children, I was her least normal, and I would reply, “Maybe I’m the one who’s normal and you all are strange”.
Anyway, for me homeschooling means freedom to be different. We do not have to wake up at the same time as the rest of the world; we do not have to go to bed when they do either. We do not have to study science in the strange disjointed order as the rest of the normal people. We can take the time to master a math function before moving to the next one and so we get a higher level of understanding.
Homeschooling allows us the freedom to explore our world and ourselves as well as the freedom to go wherever that journey takes us. We would not trade this amount of freedom for the world… and neither would my kids.
Of course, this is not where our love of homeschooling ends. For my son, homeschooling means time to explore filmmaking, computers, and art because he is able to complete his work so quickly. He is almost ready to launch his website and is in the midst of figuring out an online business by the time he turns 15.
My daughter, the drama queen, gets to spend a great deal of time focusing on plays and finding ways to get onto the stage. Because she can be flexible with her time, she can move academics to evenings when duty calls.
So that is what homeschooling means to us. What does it mean to you?
*Have a question about homeschooling? Just ask.
* Have you seen the homeschooling curriculum glossary?