Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Looking back I can see that my education started in the home. I was the oldest children and my mom worked hard to teach me a lot before my brothers were born. I was an early reader, loved learning, and loved books. I begged my mom to start school once I learned about it and at four years old I was sent to preschool at the local private school. I went twice a week and still remember my teacher. Kindergarten was even better because instead of going on Tuesdays and Thursdays I got to go Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Things changed dramatically for me in first grade.
Part way through the year my mom was no longer able to afford the private school and I was transfered to a public school. There the class was bigger and they did things differently. I felt loss and remember moving from loving to learn and go to school to hating it. The next two and a half years I struggled to make it through. We moved away in third grade and I was to start the following year in a new school. Because of this my mom held me back and I did third grade over again.
This second round of third grade was amazing and I loved it. Mrs. Veenstra made class a challenge and I was with several very smart students. We raced to see who could complete the math book first, we challenged each other in reading (I was aided by a friend on the bus who challenged me to read huge books so he had someone to talk to about them), and we even competed in spelling (an area I wasn’t so good in). Overall I loved it.
However, the next year things returned to normal. I wasn’t challenged and while I was much better in school then I had been, I hated it. I went when I had to and aimed for staying home whenever I could. Something that would prevail throughout the rest of my schooling.
I was always an avid reader, but I really hated school. Throughout junior high I was shut down when I tried to challenge myself. I wanted to take the SAT’s in eighth grade because I learned that you could. However, that was only available to “gifted” students. I had never taken the “gifted” test which was offered in third grade. The first time I did third grade no one thought of me as gifted and my local elementary only offered it to a select few students. The second time the test was given to my entire class (a good number of people who passed it), but I wasn’t yet a student because I entered school late. (We lived in Detroit during one of the strikes and then moved north where I started school). So, I wasn’t allowed to take the SAT’s. I wanted to join the ninth grade honors program, but that too was only offered to “gifted” students.
By the end of junior high I was learning more on my own than in school…so I searched for something better. The Internet had the answer. Homeschool! I firmly believed that I could teach myself more than my school was teaching me. I also thought that with the right materials I could do it in a lot less time, a lot more fun, and I could do other things rather than school for seven hours a day. I wanted it so badly…
To Be Continued.
Tags: homeschool, learning, school, teaching