Today, I learned another perk to being a homeschooling mother: no time to waste watching daytime television like “The View.” I smiled with amusement tonight when I heard that Joy Behar said on air, “a lot of them are demented when they’re homeschooled.”
How I would love the homeschooled high school teens I’ve seen in recent weeks respond to Joy, a former schoolteacher. The contrast between them and Joy would be immediately evident; the teens have manners and don’t interrupt people when they talk. They are thoughtful, logical, and base their arguments on facts instead of bias.
In the last two weeks, I’ve seen countless instances of homeschooled families that work. This morning, I saw a homeschool family whose father was off shift swimming at a local Y. Their P.E. for the day was the whole family, from the preschooler to the school kids, playing in a pool with both their parents. This afternoon, when we got our first snow of the season, my own kids dashed outside with their dad to savor the wonder of melting snow before Thanksgiving.
If we’re known by our fruits, I know lots of homeschool champions. Some are seniors, many of whom are in dual enrollment with college classes and doing well. There’s the senior boy who volunteers for inner city missions ½ day a week — while juggling a tough curriculum with advanced math and science plus college math this term. There’s the senior girl juggling her senior year, college classes, and sitting when needed for a friend’s 98-year-old grandfather. There’s the senior boy who makes time from his classes and scholarship applications to teach 2 middle school boys how to get started with HTML programming — before he heads to an aerospace program with the Civil Air Patrol. Then there’s the high school junior I recently observed taking his 6 younger siblings to a church program — and managing all of them, with the help of his teen sisters. He did a better job than some parents I’ve seen, and his younger siblings all knew how to behave. Their parents taught them well.
All of these kids have worked hard, as have their parents, to ensure they are well educated.
Unlike Behar’s fishwife shriek that they are scared of other children and are only exposed to mom and dad, these youths are engaged with their parents, siblings, friends, churches, and the community at large. Studies show 88% of homeschool graduates are involved in civic organizations, as opposed to 50% of the general public.
My kids are now middle school and high school students, and my role has evolved from primary instructor to facilitator/mentor. The biggest challenge most of the homeschooled families I know face is how to limit or moderate our outside activities so we have enough time to master academics too.
Besides church, my kids are in group swim classes, a homeschool co-op, a professional children’s choir, and multiple civic organizations. My 14-year-old daughter, trained at the state level through 4-H in recreation leadership, served as a camp counselor trainee last summer. This week, I watched her lead recreation for 20 kids, with total ease. At the ages of 12 and 13, she went by herself to workshops at Purdue and sang with the state 4-H choir at our State Fair last summer.
My 12-year-old son is currently learning web design so he can work with a team of kids to update web pages for not-for-profits for community service. He’s competed on robotics teams that have won area contests. I would pit his invented barbecue sauces he’s entered in contests against any adult chef, any time. The last 2 years, the pumpkins from his garden have won awards for being among the best in our state.
Those activities are the gravy on their academic meat and potatoes, which take the bulk of their time and mental energy. I am a product of public schools, as is my husband. We both know our children’s curriculum assignments are more challenging than those we faced at their ages. Their curricula meets them where they are — ahead in some areas, a little slower in others. If a concept isn’t mastered, we work on it until it is and may reinvent how we approach it.
Does that mean homeschooled kids are perfect? Of course not. It means that, contrary to Ms. Behar’s assertion, that they are not “demented.” Let her shriek and howl insults. I’m too busy teaching my children to care.
Both are engaged with kids from a variety of home environments, faith traditions, and education experiences: home, public, parochial, private secular, and charter schools. I know and love kids from all those different environments.
And I pray that my love and respect for those kids from many backgrounds will teach my children something Joy Behar never learned. Generalizations that disparage groups are inaccurate and wrong. I could call them an uninformed, narrow, uneducated “View.”
In my home, we call them prejudice.
