About 3 or 4 weeks ago, my husband and I made the decision to pull our
14-year-old daughter out of school and teach her at home. Not lightly or easily
either, I might add. We made up long pro and con lists, talked to
homeschoolers in the area, looked at the local school’s curriculum for high
school and counted the cost, literally. We debated, argued and reasoned with
each other. Then we gulped and decided to give it a shot. That’s when the
discussions really began in earnest. Then we had to think about exactly how
do you homeschool a kid in high school and do a good job. And what is good
job anyway? Are grades important? What is important? Yikes!

Fortunately, homeschooling has been around for a long time and going really
strong the last 20 years or so. There are a plethora of books out on the
market, most of which I either own or have read. Many are tales of happy
homeschoolers blissfully teaching their kids the love of learning. Bleh.
Most espouse their own favorite “approach” to homeschooling. They range from
a “unschooling” with no defined structure at all to classical schooling with
a prescribed 4 year cycle of learning. None of them is a perfect fit for my
daughter. So I am picking and choosing.

One book that is incredibly helpful in some sort of method is the
mother/daughter collaboration, [btitle “A Well Trained Mind”]. They outline a
Classical Approach based upon the grammar/logic/rhetoric sequence outlined
in an essay by Dorothy Sayers on education. The premise is that you start
children out learning about history/science/literature with the ancients and
move in a 4 year sequence thru modern times, repeating it for the entire 12
years of school. Each stage of the cycle has its own learning objectives;
facts come first, then logical analysis, then synthesis into a personal
opinion. Latin is begun early on, in 2nd or 3rd grade, with modern languages
added in after the basics of Latin are learned. Readings become
progressively more advanced as the child grows and matures. Writing
progresses until the child is doing a long thesis in the senior year of high
school. There is a great deal of emphasis on writing to learn and
independent study on the child’s part in the later grades. Especially
helpful, the authors outline books to use if you choose or programs that are
well-written with homeschooling or school resources listed as suppliers of
materials. If begun early on, this whole book would have been my guide to
teaching my daughter.

Unfortunately, I have gaps to fill and skills that need teaching before I
could begin this method as written. I have, however, gleaned a few useful
items. We’ll be studying Latin rather than a modern language for now. With
my daughter’s language deficits from her learning disabilities, having a
solid base of word roots will help her enormously and the program I found
teaches English grammar very well. I will follow the general idea of a
history cycle with Western Civ, American History, 20th Century History and
Civics/Government. She’ll be doing the note-taking and-book outlining they
suggest, keeping notebooks by subject and reading many of the works outlined
in the text, if in an abridged version. I am using the math program they
suggest, published by Saxon and based upon an incremental direct-instruction
method of learning math.

We did have one hurdle to get over mentally before we made the decision.
It’s the big question that homeschoolers get about socialization of the
children. Will a kid learning at home be as well socialized as a peer in
school? My husband and I struggled with this. It’s a tough one.

On the one hand, being around other kids may teach them valuable skills for
getting along with people. I am a little dubious about that one, especially
after my son came home from kindergarten proud as a peacock because he
learned to play “smear the queer” on the playground that day. It’s a form of
dodge ball, in case you are wondering. But there are some useful skills
learned about give and take in having friends your own age whom you see
daily. On the other, there is peer dependency and “the looking glass self”
mentality where kids define who they are based upon who they are with. In
high school, that gets really scary with things like drugs, sex and
rock-and-roll out there.

In the final analysis, I agree with the authors when they say “in this age
of endemic family breakup, teaching your high schooler to live peacefully in
a family is probably the most important feat of socialization you can
accomplish.” That made a huge amount of sense. Family life is the heart of
life as I see it and living well in the family is almost a key to a
fulfilling life no matter what your occupation or work is. And my sister,
ever good with the advice, pointed out that the last time she was in a room
full of people exactly her own age was at her last class reunion. She also
reminded me, the wretch, that neither of us went to prom so my daughter
won’t be missing anything there either.

It’s going to be a journey for all of us. I am frantically reading books
trying to put together a Western Civ course that will challenge her and
still teach very basic skills. I realize that this won’t always be rosy.
There will be times when I want to chuck the whole thing and send her off on
the bus to let someone else deal with because I want to wring her wretched
little neck. There will be times when I want some time just to myself
without having to go into the bathroom to get it. There will also be times
when we get to giggling together over something or decide to take a break
and go for a walk. We plan on taking good weather days off rather than snow
days. Why not stay home and learn when the weather is yucky and go for a
horse ride or to town on a nice day. We’ll see.

Docendo discitur
— Seneca (One learns by teaching)