3 Reasons why homeschooling rocks

There are more. I promise. But it’s easier to write when I think in threes, as opposed to, like, four-hundred-and-twenty-five’s. So I sat down at my laptop and asked myself “what are three reasons to homeschool?” and these were the first ones that came to mind. Which probably says something deeply revealing about my mind. But, as you know from the last post, therapy didn’t work out so well for me.

1. Your Plot is Continuous

When you watch a movie or read a book about a kid, they’re always going to school as the story is developing, but the story is almost never about them being in school. Even if it is about them being in school, it’s only because something really different is happening with their school experience (they’re learning how to be a wizard in their classes, they’re the first Jewish kid to attend a Catholic school, they’re being stalked by another student who is a zombie vampire). And even in these cases, the camera never spends much time in the classroom. In the stories we tell, school is what happens between the interesting parts. And yet school occupies most of a child’s time and is the scene for most of his/her stories. When you don’t go to school, your story opens up. It can’t be folded into the weekends or after homework or between class periods. It moves with everything you do, because anything you do has the underlying sense of adventure.

For example: when I was eleven or so, I spent a lot of my time studying wilderness survival. So my “classes” consisted of me running around in the woods with a guidebook of edible local plants, a pocketknife, and a bagel (in case I didn’t find any plants that were actually edible).

(Watch out, Brendan Fraser! They’ll find out that you’re Jewish! source)

2. You are pretty

Really, you are. I mean, you aren’t constantly comparing yourself to other people your age, and you aren’t constantly absorbing their standards, measurments, and preferences. You base your perception of yourself on your interactions with your family, small groups of your peers, and one on one time with friends.

As a little girl, I was positive that I was pretty. Not only because my parents told me I was, but because there was no reason for me not to be. I liked myself. I was smart, I did interesting things. I was good at drawing people, and was sure I would be good at anything else I tried. So of course I was pretty, too. Pretty went along with being generally good. Pretty was just an extension of my talents and my inherent self-worth. “Emily,” I told my best friend when we were five, “We are the two prettiest girls in the world, because I have brown hair, and you have blond hair.” She agreed without hesitation.

It wasn’t until college that I began to believe I wasn’t pretty. I suspected it a few times, when I ran into bigger groups of my peers, but in college, it became so much clearer.

(As a young teenager, when I saw an image of the latest hottest woman in the world, I thought, “Pssh. Whatever. Her nose is not nearly as interesting as mine.” source)

3.  You have to break rules

So many of the rules we follow every day are arbitrary and strange. Living in America, I always get this sense that we are supposed to follow all the rules and simultaneously figure out a way to break them that is cool, lavish, and brilliantly daring. We love people who dropped out ofcollege and succeeded (“Bill Gates! Bill Gates!”), but dropping out of college is considered a terrible, terrible idea in general. Just as not going to college in the first place probably means the end of your life. We love people who believed they could do something crazy, like be a pop star, and actually went and did it, but we don’t want to encourage kids to practice instruments all day. They have to learn “real skills.”

I don’t advocate kids dropping out of school, because dropping out on its own doesn’t manufacture a motivational alternative. But I’m all for breaking down the hypocritical dichotomies of “practical” and “impractical,” “possible” and “impossible.” We have to stop pretending that the only people who are able to, or entitled to, break the rules are the superheroes. The natural geniuses. The incredible child prodigies. Ordinary people have to think creatively in order to invent new business models, new machines, different ways to approach an old problem.

And when you’re unschooled, you’re already breaking all the rules. So thinking just a little differently comes just a little easier. You don’t realize how ordinary you are. And so you aren’t ordinary.

*  * *

Wild fun list: Try jumping rope with a friend. Not like, you have to have two people twirl the ropes while you leap into the fray and start cartwheeling. Just take turns. Or maybe, separately, try cartwheeling. I’m scared of this. I always think my arms will just snap off. I know, really irrational.

Check out my post about getting hit on in college, over at Eat the Damn Cake. It has a homeschooling component. Honest.

3 comments to 3 Reasons why homeschooling rocks

  • Ooooo, there will be no cartwheeling here. But I would love to trade off on jump roping! 🙂

  • High School Student

    As for Kate’s post though… the concept of homeschooling fascinates me. I’ve had a few friends who’ve went to school like, K-7, and then were homeschooled. And I just remembered that my cousins are homeschooled too, haha. Or they were. I think they all went to public high school though. When and if I choose to adopt children, I’d be interested in homeschooling them — I’d feel a little guilty about sending them to public school, at the same time I feel like it would be somehow “good for them” — but I’d be so afraid of messing them up for life, or ruining my career. (I know that second part sounds incredibly selfish.)

    Your WFL item today reminds me of the time we tied those stretchy bands that you… um, stretch with, I guess?… around our ankles in gym class and then did a “routine”? Like there was one set of bands, and so you were connected to the person at the other end of the band, and you would do cartwheels togehter, and then a third person would cartwheel through it while you were both cartwheeling? That probably sounded incredibly confusing, but it was always super-fun! (High school gym is no fun. Weight-lifting. And running. Every. Single. Day. Which is doubly no fun for a girl who’s not supposed to lift because of her back and who has exercise-induced bronchospasm, lol!)

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