how many of you guys

[mzteris]

homeschooled, or wish you had(!) because public school was just not a good fit for you. And if it wasn't, why not?


And if it WAS a good place, please tell us what they had right about educating kids who are a little bit "different". . .

[Odin2005]

1. My life would have been SOOOO much better had I been homeschooled

There is no worse hell of neurotypical shallowness and groupthink then public schools. People who go spouting off about kids needing to go to public schools so they are "properly socialized (that is, indoctrinated into the groupthink)" deserve to get kicked in the nuts. Public schools are not about learning, they are about making kids accept being little cogs in the machine.

[mzteris]

2. i'm sorry you had to go through that . . .

that seems to be the experience of most "quirky" kids.


Thank you for answering.

[SheilaT]

3. I'm the mother of an Asperger's

son, now 26. He wasn't diagnosed until he was 18. I simply thought he was "quirky", albeit very smart. We moved him from the (very good, I must say) public school system to a better, very academically oriented private school starting in 7th grade. In the private school he was no longer bullied -- he was also very small for his age -- and his smarts were valued. He participated in Science Bowl, and it is my opinion he's the main reason his team went to nationals two years in a row. His own science teachers kept on expressing amazement at what he knew.

Long before I knew he was an Aspie, I considered home schooling him, but decided against it because I do not have the temperament to home school. I am not patient if someone doesn't get something right away. What I did do, however, was to provide a lot of enrichment kinds of things outside of school: gymnastics, pottery, lots of summer camps. There were times, especially in the best of the summer programs, when I saw a different, perhaps better vision of what school could be like. There's too much rigidity in the standard system. And the classroom sizes are much too large.

In my son's case, he was slow at picking up reading, but he was fast at math. In first grade he had to stay back in math, doing lock-step stuff with the other kids, even though on his own he was figuring out multiplication and division. Meanwhile, the kids who had caught on with the reading were able to plow ahead, reading stuff they were ready for, while my son stayed back, struggling to figure it out. Imagine if it had been different, if my son had been given independent math, while all those kids who could already read had to stay at my son's level.

I often tell parents that they should give serious thought to home schooling their kids if for no other reason than it keeps them very aware of what's actually happening with their kids and the schools.

One further comment. The most successful home schooling cases I personally know of were two boys whose moms home schooled them only for a short time (one for four years, the other only one) and in both cases did a lot of stuff with other home schooling groups. they did very careful picking and choosing of what they wanted their kids to participate in.