Starting Homeschooling in the Middle Grades

By: Linda Popolano
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:26:55
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I spent the first few years of my son's life reading a lot of books about parenting and quite a few about homeschooling. I remember thinking something along the lines of "it's great that people can do that with their children, but I don't know if I could." Especially since my son was an only child, I didn't feel that family, friends, and acquaintenances would be supportive of him spending so much time with only me. But I loved sharing books with him and teaching him new things, playing imaginative games and making up novel ways to learn. Always the dutiful mom wanting to do the right thing, however, I visited preschools, found a great Montessori school, and enrolled him. That worked fine and still left us more than enough time to learn together.

Fast forward a few years, though, and we found ourselves living in a different state, in a county with an overcrowded school system, with middle school rapidly approaching. I was already disappointed in the elementary school he was getting ready to leave, because despite his achievements and fine grades there, I saw gaps and deficiences in his learning that I could not easily help him repair with the very few hours left over to us at the end of each's day's classes and activities, especially when we both were tired. He was doing advanced grade mathematics and yet needed to use his fingers if I asked him to do a quick calculation at the supermarket. When he wrote anything longer than a phrase, he committed multiple spelling errors. And while he had hours of "creative" homework, his foundation in basic skills seemed shaky. What was really frightening to me is that his academic weaknesses seemed to grow after he had just spent two years in "gifted" classes and now he was scheduled for all six of his middle school classes to be "gifted" classes.

The middle school turned out to be even more overcrowded than the elementary school. Homework began to take up to five hours each evening, depriving my son of time for reading books of his own choice and threatening to leave him no time to attend his beloved weekly theatre group. It just didn't seem right, especially since he seemed to be learning more from the books he read on his own and was gaining incredible poise and speaking ability from participating in the theatre group. Seven weeks into middle school, after I had suggested it several times, he came home from school one day and basically said, "I don't want to go back there; I'll try your idea to homeschool".

We agreed to homeschool as a one-year experiment. I will admit the first weeks were rough on both of us. I lay awake at night wondering if I was ruining his life. He, on the other hand, was in the process of "deschooling", though at the time I had never heard the term and wondered why he didn't want to get off the couch and do all the fun learning things I had planned. He had seemed depressed in the middle school and now he still seemed depressed. But within three or four weeks, we found a homeschool support group that met weekly at a local park. I was able to talk to parents with experience in homeschooling, and he was able to see there were other kids like him and that he had a place to make new friends. A few weeks later, he told me he did not ever want to go back to that middle school, so that we would do this through eighth grade. Six months later, he took a homeschool coop class in algebra and met homeschooled high-schoolers. Then, he went a step beyond as far as I'd ever thought about, announcing he also wanted to homeschool high school.

So here we are today, on the threshold of eleventh grade. It's been an incredible journey and sometimes I am as amazed as anyone that it has worked fine. After the first year, it got much, much easier. We learned about one another's expectations, made compromises, and, in time, he became the self-motivated learner he had been as a pre-schooler all over again. While I did teach during those middle school years, I find for high school I am more the guidance counselor, the curriculum consultant, and the recordkeeper.

I'm writing this for all parents who were like me, daydreaming about homeschooling but wondering if they could really do it. I remember once during the summer after my son's fourth grade year thinking that he was one-third of the way to the end of high school and that there was SO much I wanted to tell him, teach him, share with him, and pass onto him in the eight years that were left, but that with school and social activities it seemed there would never be enough time. Well, let me tell you, without "real school", I've been able to do all that telling, teaching, and sharing in just the last five years....all of it. That feeling of not enough time has gone, replaced with the knowing that whatever the future brings, I've given him the experiences, the knowledge, and the foundation I wanted him to have. Seize the day!

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