Do I just not understand or not fit in???

I just don’t understand most people and the homeschooling group is an odd group of people. Maybe I find it odd because I don’t fit in. It didn’t set out to homeschool, we didn’t even really choose homeschooling…it just happened. When we first had J we didn’t think anything of how we would school our kid for we were sure we would send him to school like everyone does. I had visions of PTA, school projects, dances and things of that sort. Boy, what a pipe dream that was.

When J started reading on his own just after he turned 3 years old, a friend of mine that has been a public school teacher for years (with little to no time for the gifted child), told me “he is going to have a very hard time in public school or school in general…what you are going to do with him?” That was really the first time I had thought about it. Here I had been doing things with him for years just to keep myself busy but now I had a very smart little one on my hands. We still didn’t think to homeschool until the day came to register him for Kindergarten then we realized he would not like it for it was at least a year or two below him academy.

We still kept the thought there was a good school out there for him but while we looked I continued to do things with him as I always had. Then D was born and I started to have less and less time to find and create thing for J to do. This led me to searching for schools for gifted children. I found a few groups in the area that dealt with older gifted kids and was referred to Calvert for homeschool materials. I was all ready to order the material, even with the high cost, to help J and to save my sanity when a lady I know told me about a public school that would cover the costs of the materials. I couldn’t believe it so I looked harder and asked my homeschool network what they thought. I got a lot of responses about how it was bad to let the government interfere in homeschooling and that we as homeschoolers should be worried about the “handouts” that the public schools are giving.

That is when I really started to realize I don’t really fit in the homeschool world. Here I am worried about the quality of my son’s education and they are worried about how much control the government might have in the schooling of their children. It takes a lot of money to school children and give them what we would like to give them so if the public school, to which I pay taxes, is willing to help me get homeschool materials to school my child I’m all for it. I don’t see anything wrong with: having to review a child monthly, having the child contact another person weekly to talk about what they are learn, or submit active hours learning.

Maybe it is just me. I also find there are not a lot of homeschooling parents that are willing to be gone more days than not while following a curriculum but I figure that is what they would do if they went to a school building so that is what I should be providing here. Maybe that is just wrong of me to see it that way but that is how I see it. We have recently found a school for gifted children and will be looking into it a bit more for the boys but we will see. Now that we have started this homeschool thing it isn’t too bad but we want to make sure that we give our children the best we can offer.