Choosing to homeschool is a big decision. It’s not for every family… and it’s not even for every kid in every family. It’s an even harder decision when you start to think about the middle and high school years and the pressure begins to mount as you consider the future your children may have. Even as a second-generation homeschool parent, I am not immune to those anxious thoughts. I thought it would be helpful to others, as well as a reminder to myself, to share my story as a homeschooler and how I navigated life after graduation.
The Summer I Turned Thirteen
During the ’95-’96 school year my younger sister was really struggling to keep up with math due to mild dyslexia and dyscalculia, plus testing in general was becoming an anxiety causing situation. She knew someone at school that was going to be homeschooled in the new school year, so she asked our parents about being homeschooled herself. She was then in the fifth grade, I was in seventh grade, and our brother was in eighth grade. Our brother was also dealing with bullying to a degree that was getting out of hand. My parents took this request seriously, and after prayer and discussions with the very few others they knew already home educating, they decided to pull us all out of the public school system for the next school year. So in the fall of ’96 I began my homeschool career as an eighth grader. Homeschooling was still considered very weird in those days. Thankfully, my mom seemed to handle this all with grace and I honestly give my parents a lot of props for pulling us out during the years a lot of homeschoolers start putting their kids in public school. I’m sure it was a hard decision to make, and they were doing what they thought was best for us with the information they had and the leading of the Holy Spirit.
We had lots of opportunities within the mid-Ohio region for co-op groups and one-off classes. We had a Spanish instructor for three years, a math tudor when required, private music lessons (I was even in a flute choir), small classes for speech and debate, research writing, creative writing, science labs with a group, and so much more that I’m sure I don’t even remember it all. We were kind of the odd ones a lot of times in homeschool circles because we didn’t quite fit the brand at this particular point in homeschool history. I do remember there being some cliches within certain co-ops, because that is human nature and you’re going to experience that in and out of the public school setting unfortunately. I had a small group of close friends and we got together often. One of my friends and I still have most of our penpal correspondence that we like to make each other look at every few years. (I’m looking at you, Hilary.) My family was also very into going to Christian concerts during those years from 1996-2000 and that was a big part of our family culture and vacations.
As for the at-home curriculum we used… it varied from year-to-year, but most choices were of a more traditional nature. Saxon Math for a while, and then Houghton Mifflin (same book the public schooled kids were using) when I couldn’t deal with the boringness that was Saxon Math anymore (IYKYK). Bob Jones for history (ahem). Abeka (maybe?) or Alpha Omega Publication’s LifePACs for science and biblical studies. Rod & Staff for general language arts. Wordly Wise and Vocabulary from Classical Roots for grammar. I don’t even remember what we used for literature specifically. Overall I had a very positive homeschool experience and I would do it again if I had to do it over. Maybe with more living books, though. 😉
Top to Bottom, Left to Right: Braces day with curly hair I hadn’t quite learned to manage, classy senior photo, flute choir Christmas performance, even classier senior photo, and high school memorabilia.
Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes and Life Transitions
Early Highschool Graduate
So, how did this ‘lil naive homeschooled kid make it out there in the big bad world you may wonder?? Well, I just don’t know how I managed since I wasn’t socialized and didn’t attend prom. GASP!! ha!
I was a very disciplined and driven teen, so at some point in my highschool years I decided I wanted to try to graduate a year early. My older brother was a year ahead of me in school, and I figured I could just graduate in 2000 with him. When you are homeschooled and have the time available, you can double up your course studies even without taking college level courses. (I do wish I’d taken advantage of that opportunity, but alas I did not.) For us, if we finished a year-long curriculum, we got the credits. We did not track actual hours. We took a standardized test at the end of every year just like the public schoolers and then we moved on. I took the ACT, got a 24 which isn’t ideal, and went on my merry way. I did also create my own highschool transcript. I’m sure it’s more organized now and “official”.
Life Goals and Reality
I pretty much had a full time job at 16 and was able to finish my junior/senior year while working. It was a unique situation, and if I didn’t have anything to do for my employer, I was free to work on my lessons. I graduated about a week shy of my 17th birthday and I kept working (but had to get rides to work because I didn’t have my license yet). I wasn’t interested in college at the time. I thought I wanted to open my own music venue in Nashville, TN and I didn’t think I needed to go to college to do that.
I was teaching myself HTML for fun, running a successful band fansite, getting hired by bands to do their websites, and getting hired by the band I ran the fansite for to develop their online merch and make edits to their website. This was a band that was on a big Christian label. I was going to move to Nashville and live with their manager and his family, and I was going to realize my dream of working in the music industry. Well, as the fickle world of music business goes, the label dropped the band (they weren’t suited for that genre really and were way ahead of their time) before I could get to Nashville, and I didn’t have those plans lined up anymore with them. So then I was stuck wondering what in the world I was going to do. My parents never pressured me into going to college, but the society at large seemed to at that point for my generation.
College as a Homeschool Grad
So, I decided to just go to college because that’s what everyone else did and I felt like maybe I did need a degree to pursue my dream of opening my own music venue. I still wanted to be in Nashville, so I found a Christian university there that offered a program I was interested in (Business Music), went for a visit, decided to apply, got accepted and started in January 2002. About a year and 6 months after graduating from highschool.
I feel like being homeschooled and having ownership of my education really prepared me for college life. I was a very organized person then too, so that served me well as I knew I would need to stay on top of things myself. No one was going to be holding my hand and making sure I completed assignments on time and went to class.
While living away from home was hard at first, I adjusted to the college life six hours away from home fairly well. I got a job right away, got involved in a church, made friends, went to numerous $5 cover concerts in random venues (sometimes even by myself), and got lost in Nashville countless times. Overall my first semester was a success! In addition to my part-time job, I had an internship off and on, babysat and cleaned houses off campus, was a Resident Assistant for two years, and pretty much maxed out my classes/credit load every semester. I was really living that college dream. Ha! My husband likes to tell me, “You may have had a 4.0, but I had friends.” He thinks he’s funny.
I graduated with honors 3 years later in May of 2005 with a Bachelors in Business Administration (concentration in Music Business) and was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by my peers…whatever that means. Graduating from college made me feel even more pressure to “make something of myself” and I did not even really know what that was going to be. I had a wonderful college experience, and the only thing I would trade is the debt I took on (which is thankfully paid off now).
Post-College Life
After graduation, my employer all through college offered me a full-time job and I took it because it felt secure and I didn’t mind the work. However, it wasn’t in the music industry.
I got connected to an opportunity with a well known music brand and interviewed. It had very intense job responsibilities, but the exposure would have been amazing and I would have been rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in the business. I felt like I was very qualified for the role, and had a good feeling about the interview, albeit somewhat intimidated. The VP was going to review applicants and get back to me. Well, I didn’t have peace about it. He called me with a job offer, and was surprised when I turned it down. I think looking back my life would have taken a drastic turn if I had accepted. I still maintain some relationships with those I met through the music industry, and I have wonderful memories from those times in my life!
I ended up finding a great job working in corporate healthcare, which (not) shockingly pays more than music industry jobs, and I made some great friends and memories. I never did open my own music venue… and I think that dream died a bit while I was still in college even. I moved home in 2007, and then moved back to Nashville in 2008, which is when my relationship with my (now) husband morphed from a close friendship into something more. A year later we were married. I was 26. My last position before coming home full-time in 2014 was as a financial analyst managing about $35 million in capital funds for 20+ hospitals. A role that I didn’t feel exactly prepared for (because I was not an accounting major), but my employer had faith in my abilities to learn. In 2012 we had our first child, 2014 another baby, 2016 a third, and 2018 our last baby. We are now comfortably in our ninth year (at the time of this posting) of homeschooling.
I don’t think I really ever gave much thought to how we wanted to see our own children educated, but when we got closer to our oldest’s entrance to kindergarten the reality of having to make a choice became immediate. You can read more about our top reasons for choosing home education from this older post here. All in all, I had a great experience being homeschooled in my teen years and I think things have just gotten easier and more available to families as the decades have rolled on. It’s definitely not as much of a social stigma to be homeschooled, but we still have a ways to go on that front in our culture.
Are you a fellow second-generation homeschooler? Was your experience similar or did you have a not-so-great experience? I know that not everyone has had a positive experience and I think it’s important that we talk about those things as well. It’s very common for it all to be painted as this beautiful, life-giving thing, and that’s just not the case for everyone.