“Oh, you’re doing that, too?,” the building
contractor asked when he walked in while my son was working on his
Literature lesson. “My youngest daughter is taking high school
online. They were bullying her at school.”
While he undid something interesting my wife had done to the
garbage disposal and then measured for book shelves, he added, “It
looks like she’ll already have her freshman year finished in
December.”
Just weeks after signing on to home-based schooling, and two
days into formal lessons, we’re running into a fair number of
kindred spirits who also opted out of brick and mortar schools.
Some are using traditional homeschooling methods from a variety of
sources, others (like us) are paying for online private schools,
and the majority use virtual charter schools, which are an easy
option in Arizona.
My sister has been homeschooling one of my nephews with a mix of
offline and online resources for a year.
They all tell us that the initial learning curve is steep, but
it eventually settles in. That’s good news, because my wife and I
feel like we’re back in school ourselves, prepping lessons and
mastering the school’s tools. Anthony, for his part, took to the
new school like a fish to water. The fact that he looks forward to
his lessons is a hell of a nice change from our experience over the
past year.
Much of that enthusiasm, I’m convinced, comes from the fact that
the pace can be tailored to him. He’s already tested out of
material that was too basic, and he doesn’t have to sit at a desk
waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. “It feels like
they’re trying to help me, not bore me to death,” he told my
wife.
We move him through assessments until he hits a challenge, and
then we get down to actual learning. Even then, the goal is
mastery, not just putting ink on worksheets. If he learns the
information, we move on.
And we no longer have to wade through answers of “he’s doing
fine” when we’re curious about Anthony’s progress, only to discover
that “fine” can have a surprisingly broad range of meaning. We
track the lessons and approve assessments ourselves.
Our contractor is having a similar experience with his daughter,
as evidenced by her conversion of freshman year into a semester. My
11-year-old nephew is sufficiently well along that he could
probably educate some of his old instructors.
It’s too early yet to call our experiment in schooling at home a
success; I suppose we could stiill fuck this up. But for the first
time in a long time, my son is enjoying learning.
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