What can you say? Or should you just say nothing at all?
Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 6:32 pm
I am new here, and it’s an interesting place here with a lot of things regarding homeschooling that I had never considered. I don’t come here as a parent homeschooling a child or as a child who was homeschooled. Instead, I come here as someone who sells curriculum to parents on a daily basis. When I first started my job at this bookstore in Texas, I was sixteen and knew nothing about state laws concerning home education, nor anything about the curriculum we sold, other than that much of it was costly and came in brightly colored packages with smiling children on the covers. So after a week of sounding like an idiot when current and prospective homeschoolers would come to me with questions, I did the only thing I could do: research. I checked out a book published by the Texas Homeschool Coalition from the library, and surfed around a few websites about homeschooling, browsing through laws and statistics. Needless to say, I was surprised.
In Texas, homeschools are considered private schools, and are in no way regulated by the state save a few suggestions about teaching math, language arts, sciences, and good citizenship. I kept an open mind, thinking that public schools that were regulated by the Texas Education Agency really couldn’t guarantee the success of a child’s education any more than a private home school could. That’s not mentioning that the positive statistics surrounding homeschooling spoke so highly for it. So after a few weeks, I got more comfortable explaining the ins and outs of home education and various curricula to parents.
Then I started meeting parents who did homeschool. I saw a lot of seasoned veterans and some newbies ready to dive in. I heard their stories. I even discovered that I worked alongside several homeschooled people. And that’s where my optimistic feelings about homeschooling really began to become conflicted. My two coworkers were as unalike as night and day. One had been homeschooled since the second grade and had never looked back. She and her brothers and sisters were all in college by that point, and this particular girl was smart as a whip with a good sense of humor: a clear success story. Yet there was another girl who really seemed to struggle. She had also “graduatedâ€
In Texas, homeschools are considered private schools, and are in no way regulated by the state save a few suggestions about teaching math, language arts, sciences, and good citizenship. I kept an open mind, thinking that public schools that were regulated by the Texas Education Agency really couldn’t guarantee the success of a child’s education any more than a private home school could. That’s not mentioning that the positive statistics surrounding homeschooling spoke so highly for it. So after a few weeks, I got more comfortable explaining the ins and outs of home education and various curricula to parents.
Then I started meeting parents who did homeschool. I saw a lot of seasoned veterans and some newbies ready to dive in. I heard their stories. I even discovered that I worked alongside several homeschooled people. And that’s where my optimistic feelings about homeschooling really began to become conflicted. My two coworkers were as unalike as night and day. One had been homeschooled since the second grade and had never looked back. She and her brothers and sisters were all in college by that point, and this particular girl was smart as a whip with a good sense of humor: a clear success story. Yet there was another girl who really seemed to struggle. She had also “graduatedâ€