The Happenstance Homeschooler

 happenstance: noun

1) a circumstance especially that is due to chance

What are the chances that I'd find myself starting a blog about homeschooling?  Much less, what are the chances that I'd find myself actually homeschooling my kids?

There have been many circumstances that have led our family to this place - all of which right now feel like they've been preparing us for this all along, but none of which we realized were leading us here.  Yet, here we are. 

As a beginner homeschooling, making the leap from public education, I'm starting this blog to catalog our journey into and through homeschooling (whatever that may look like).  I'm hoping it can be a place for me to record our experience and maybe to encourage others who find themselves thinking, "I want deeply to do this, but am I really doing this?"

I don't expect this to be a perfect path.  I know myself, and I know my son.  We will lose our minds sometimes.  Yet even with that knowledge, I feel confident and led toward this shift for our family.  My conviction is strong despite myself.  

How did we arrive at this juncture from being parents who wholeheartedly believed in the public school experience?  We chose the public route even after being offered a full ride to a private school in our area.  Our reason being that we wanted our son to experience "adversity and diversity."  Those were our exact words as we gratefully and respectfully declined the scholarship.  I think, though, at the time, we weren't clear on what type of adversity and diversity we had in mind.  

When thinking of what we wanted for our son, we both had things in mind like: 

• A variety of friends from different backgrounds
• Football games and pep rallies
• Various teachers with different approaches to acclimate to
• Similar educational and social challenges we faced
• Disagreements with friends that we worked through and grew stronger in our friendships
• Exposure to experiences we could say no to because of strong family values
• And an appropriate level of stress that pushed us outside our comfort zone enough to grow 

We had in mind the world we grew up in.  

Since our son began public Kindergarten 5 years ago, what we've come to understand is that he is not growing up in the world we did.  I don't know exactly when it changed or when it began to change, but we are see clearly that the educational and social challenges he faces are far beyond what we did.  

I want to stop here to say that this blog is by no means a manifesto arguing that every family should homeschool.  I am fully aware that our circumstances are extremely unique and allow us to make this choice (more on that later).  I simply aim to clarify my own thoughts and speak to our experience. It may match yours and it may not.  And that's okay.  Maybe there will something here that you find helpful.  

So back to how we happened upon this crossroads.  I'll begin with the elephant in the room: Standardized Testing.  I am one of those rare beasts who actually enjoys testing.  I love all things school, in fact.  However, it seems that the focus and importance placed on standardized testing now has completely changed since I was in school.  Back then (in the old days, as my son calls them), we played in school, we were creative, we did projects, and we collaborated.  Then sometime during the second semester, there was a week or two when our teachers talked to us about the "Big Test" coming up.  We were encouraged to get a good night's sleep, eat a good breakfast, and do our very best.  There was a minor amount of stress for a finite period of time.  We took the test. And it was over.  

That is, unfortunately, not the case now.  The buildup to the test back in the day occurred over the course of a few weeks at most, died down and the same thing repeated again the next school year.  

Now, the buildup begins in Kindergarten when you are told that your child needs to be reading at such and such level so that they are not "behind" when they get to the older grades when testing begins.  It becomes clear, very quickly, that the focus is on making sure your child can perform on a test they will take in the distant future rather than on developing and guiding them in a way appropriate for their age now.  Play, creativity, and social/emotional development are words that don't exist in the dialog between teacher and parent.  

I'm a firm believer in the words of Fred Rogers when he reminds us that "Play is the work of childhood."  I know that brain research supports this, and it is evidenced by the onslaught of diagnoses we are seeing in younger and younger children who cannot or will not meet these unrealistic expectations.  They are stripped of curiosity, wonder, and connection in favor of preparing to perform on a test that, let's face it, the results of which determine the amount of money a school district receives from the government.  We are placing the burden of funding on children and doing so at the expense of their childhood.  The more I contemplate this, the more my heart hurts for the childhoods all across our country that are being lost.  So, for my husband and I, we want our son to love learning and stay curious rather than simply learning to pass a test that has no bearing on his future and gives no accurate measurement of who he is characteristically or intellectually.  He, and all children, are much, much more than their performance on a test.  And they need to be reminded of that every single day by those who care for them.   

The focus on testing, emphasis on funding, and inappropriate expectations are just a symptom of an even greater problem.  This leads me to our second reason for deciding to homeschool.  Observe the behaviors of people as you are out in public.  We are consumed by media, social media, consumerism, and technology.  Each one of us, myself included, has a little device glued to us at practically all times (we even take it to the bathroom with us! You know you do it too.).  And the attachment to the physical device is simply a result of our addiction to what the device provides us - a hit of dopamine here with a Facebook "like." A  dab of dopamine there with a text notification.  And a splash of dopamine here with an alert of a new Insta follower.  We rely on these notifications, likes, and follows to build us up.  And the more we do it, the more dependent we become.  Few of us are cultivating validation internally.  Why do we need to if our phone makes it so easy for us?  Sounds great, right?  Yes ... until, like with any other addiction, what we get simply isn't enough, and we need more and more likes and follows to achieve our high.  Like any other addict, we become blind to our addiction.  In fact, we are in such denial that we then place this "drug" into the hands of our children.  Kids younger and younger are being handed phones.  And we as parents justify it by praising them for sitting quietly at the dinner table in a restaurant or  by telling ourselves, "It's a dangerous world out there, and I need to be able to get ahold of or track them."  Or, horror of all horrors, we give in when they tell us they need a phone because "everyone else has one."  

My husband and I are already fighting this fight with our 10 year old who has informed us that he is one of only 2 children in his class of 18 who does not have a phone.  He is in 4th grade.  I use the word "fight" loosely because it hasn't really taken much convincing for him to understand that this is a hard "no" for us.  We began that talk very early on by explaining the dangers and unnecessariness of kids having phones.  Most of the time, he understands and even says he doesn't need a phone because "It's lame to sit and stare at a screen watching other kids play with toys when I could be playing with toys myself."  But based on what I'm observing in his peers and their parents, we and he, are in the minority when it comes to sticking to our guns on this.  Luckily for him, his dad and I are as strong willed as he is! 

What does this have to do with our deciding to homeschool him, you ask?  Are we trying to shelter him from the world?  Don't we know that the more we try to shelter our kids, the more they rebel when they're older?  

I have thought long and hard about these questions.  We have never been hovering or helicoptering parents.  In fact, when he was little, we probably let him do things that other parents cringed at like playing barefoot in the street *gasp* and riding his bike around the block when he was five *eek!*  So why now all the sudden a desire to keep him from exposure to the "real world?"  My answer is simple.  Nothing about this false, technology, like-and-follow driven world is real.  He goes to school and learns about You-Tubers from his friends.  He comes home and asks to watch them.  We watch along with him to see what the hype is ,and what we see is a performance.  But it is a performance that so closely resembles real life that it succeeds in convincing young, undeveloped brains that this is how life is supposed to be: multi-million dollar mansion, endless new toys rolling in, big over the top birthday parties, and loud, excessive reactions to the smallest successes like landing a water bottle after flipping it in the air or catching a 5 inch fish in a tank the size of our breakfast table.  And then I see him trying to emulate these behaviors.  Oh no, son.  Not in my house.  

But so many of us, because we are busy, are not monitoring the influencers shaping our children's minds and behavior.  And to make matters worse, because their behavior mimics that of their friends and many of us are affected  by these same influencers, we chalk it up to "kids these days." No matter how inappropriate, annoying, or disingenuous it is, we let it slide as the new norm.  And we have forgotten what is real. 

Newsflash: This AI, dopamine driven world is not real.

What's real is children wanting to run outside, get dirty, climb trees, fall down, and get back up again.  What's real is awkwardness at puberty rather than perfect contouring and "riz." What's real is having an argument with a friend, being mad, making up, and not thinking about it again rather than having an argument with a friend, being shamed and humiliated on Facebook, and becoming depressed and suicidal because you can't escape the ridicule.  This may sound hyperbolic, but anecdotal and statistical data says otherwise.  These problems are very, very real.  

So I have to say, I do not think our decision is in an effort to shelter our son, but rather the opposite - a deep desire to take him out of this inauthentic, performance driven world and gift him with his childhood.  We want his education to come from his own curiosity and excitement about his world rather than from test-driven instruction or from someone else's influence based on their own need for a dopamine fix.  

I know that this post has taken a somewhat negative undertone, and I don't mean for that to be the case at all.  But if it has, that's only because of the stark-reality that we live in a world that feeds us a lot of toxic ideas that are detrimental to our and our children's wellbeing.  If this blog calls attention to that, so be it.  But the truth is, my husband and I know there is so much beauty in the world to be seen.  So many things to wonder about.  So many things to be in awe of.  We have to look hard and peek underneath the superficial overlay that the current state of things covers it all up with, but we want to teach our sons to do just that. We want them to wonder and be rendered breathless by the world.  To know their place in it and to know what's real.  We want them to know that things can be ugly and beautiful at the same time.  That perfection exists only in the seeming imperfection of the natural world that dies and is reborn every day.  We want them to touch and smell the bloom that's gone as quickly as it came because ... such is life.  We want them to know their own fragility and mortality rather than  giving them a false sense of security through artificially generated worlds.  

So, I guess, the answer to the question, "Are we trying to shelter our kids?" is "No.  Plain and simply - no.  We are trying to take them out from under the impression that things can be, are, or should be perfect and expose them to a world that embraces them and their dirty faces, bare feet, sadness, and joy so that they can wonder about it, revel in it, and learn from it.  That is what, we believe, learning should be.  

They say that your kids are a mirror, and they reflect back to you the things in yourself that need growth.  And boy do we know this to be true! All of a sudden, we find ourselves staring into the mirror seeing a mom and dad who need to take a risk.  We need to take the risk of pulling our children out of a world that is "normal" so that they can LIVE in a world that's REAL.