My family had a conversation last night about when we would graduate the kids from homeschool.
We started talking about SAT scores for my son that we should receive on Tuesday and the fact that we couldn’t graduate him next year if he took the PSAT and qualified for the National Merit Program (he took the SAT first as a practice for the PSAT). Because the PSAT had to be taken in your Jr. year to qualify for the National Merit program, we were trying to figure out if he had to wait another year to graduate even though he would have fulfilled all of the normal public school requirements for graduation, and then some. My son made it clear that he was in no hurry to graduate at 16 years old and was happy to keep himself occupied with homeschool studies and internships for another year and graduate at 17.
Then we began discussing the fact that our daughter is on a similar track, only that she is officially a 9th grader at 13. She is set to graduate at 16 regardless. She WILL be doing her first two years of college from home if we have anything to say about it!
(keep in mind that they both have summer birthdays’s so they they would start the next school year older)
What’s the rush anyway?
Renae Deckard of the Life Nurturing Educaton blog writes Is Education a Race? In the blog post, she tells a story of how she learned to slow down and relax about her learning timelines and find those focussed moments in which to teach her son. The comments that followed showed how anxious many of us homeschoolers are about meeting arbitrary guidelines for our own comfort, to prove something to our families, and to prove that homeschooling works for the world.
What we need to realize is that in setting our kids up against some ill fitting timeline that we are doing them a disservice. Children learn best at their own speed, giving them new information, only when they have digested what came before fully. Think about it. Would you feed your child a full 3 course meal every hour on the hour before his body had the chance to process what it had already eaten? Remember, that food is good, but morbid obesity is bad. Likewise teaching with a set curriculum is good, but at too great a speed, we are not doing the child is good.
But here’s the rub… or reward (however you want to see it.) I did teach my kids at their own speed and many times held my breath worrying that we weren’t accomplishing anything. There were some years that I looked back and wondered if I had not shot my kids in the proverbial leg. But here we are, at high school level and my kids are shooting through it at light speed. Why? Because we did not rush them earlier. Because they fully digested everything they needed to learn when they were younger, they were able to test through alot of high school material that is typically re-taught in a public school.
So I say to all of you nervous homeschoolers out there… relax? Where’s the fire? Let your kids continue to move at their own pace. They will have ‘hare’ years and they will have ‘tortoise’ years, but you do remember who won the race in the end right?
~If you liked this you should also read my blogs at the home blog, the parents blog, and the frugal blog. You can read my recent posts here.
Also read: African American Homeschooling, Increasing the Odds
Do You Have a High School Graduation Plan?
New Plans to Graduate Kids in 10th Grade