Public School or Home School?  That was the big question for me for a long time. 

I’ve just discovered that some of my closest online friends didn’t realize I had children homeschooling and children in public school.  Some of you have asked about it, and I sometimes get questions about it IRL, so I’ll share a bit about how we ended up doing what we do.

Isn’t this fun??  It feels like an interview, so I have some snazzy (well maybe not) pictures of moi trying to look interviewish.  (I try not to wear my reading glasses IRL, but at 45 the print is starting to get smaller.  Or maybe my arms are getting shorter.)

Here goes.

Rewind to about 10 years ago.  I had two little boys in public school and another little boy toddler at home.  By this time I knew how little boys loved to play.  I mean really play.  Sticks, mud.  Making all sorts of boy noises while pushing cars and trucks around on whatever will serve as a road — coffee table, yard, floor, mommy’s knee. 

All three of my boys loved being read to.  They were good children.  They were very sweet little boys, even if I do say so myself.

Meanwhile, the public school was busy telling me that my oldest son had ADD and his teacher was constantly urging me to get him evaluated and on medication.  I was sick to death of notes coming home saying ”your son has a hard time sitting still in his seat,” and yet what would the teacher do?  She would take his recess away as punishment.  It just didn’t make any sense to me.  I understood her frustration.  I was frustrated.  But it seemed to me like maybe two recesses would have helped the little boys in school who couldn’t sit still.  Taking recess away only caused more unreleased energy to build up in an already busy little boy.

A few classes down the hallway was my second son, struggling to learn his letters, struggling with what would end up being diagnosed later as dyslexia.  Even in 2nd grade, the teachers were already stressing to him the importance of end-of-grade testing to come.  He began to come home wondering why was I born?  I, meanwhile, was wondering if they needed to keep going to that school.  The final straw (well one of them) was when a paper came home with one word written on it, in big red letters, by the teacher herself.  It was to indicate to me that my little Joseph had not done the assignment because he had been pulled out of his regular class for his speech class.  But you know what she had written across that worksheet, in her red ink? 

SPEACH

Yes.  S-p-e-a-c-h. 

My husband was not for pulling the children out, but he was not against it.  He left it up to me.  So I pulled them out, knowing that I would have to teach them and work at the same time.  At that time I didn’t really have set work hours, but a certain amount of production to get done each week, so I vowed I’d stay up and type through the night if I had too. 

I registered our homeschool and I pulled my two oldest boys out of school.

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It would be exhausting to type out every little thing that has happened through the years, and I doubt you’d want to read it all anyway.  

Let’s be honest.  It was NOT easy trying to homeschool my two sons, and then the third one too when he hit kindergarten age, and then add a preschooler into the mix and work full time, but we did it and we loved it.  Loved it!  My third son happened to be a good reader and an early reader.  He was reading eagerly at 5, which, if you’ve had a bunch of boys, you know is relatively young for a boy to want to read.

I loved the homeschooling lifestyle AND the homeschooling community at large.  I made some wonderful friends.  We met some amazing children.  But there was always a sadness for me.  I didn’t do freelance work that gave me tremendous flexibility.  We didn’t have the money for me to not work at all.  I had a certain amount of work that I had to get done every week come heck or high water.  After homeschool outings, when other mothers were going home to rest (they didn’t work), I was going home to hit the keyboard, exhausted, tired, with yet 8 hours of work to do and supper to cook. 

Overall I was very happy to be homeschooling.  But I was getting tired.  And I was wondering if I could give some of my children more by looking into good schools for them.

As the children got older and needed more challenging work and more help with problems, i.e. math and grammar, it became harder for me to keep it all done.  I was also constantly torn emotionally because I wanted a certain lifestyle so much — a full-throttle homeschool lifestyle, but I could only have this much of it. 

Time for a comical note here:  I just asked Princess of the Universe what I looked like I was doing in this picture.  She said, “smashing a tiny little brain that no one can see.”  (Maybe it’s the look on my face? )

Maybe I was smashing brains by trying to homeschool and work, mostly my brain.  (The children seem fine.)

Now.  Where were we?  Oh yes.  I was working full time, I was homeschooling four children, and then I got a middle-of-the-night call that my dad had had a cerebral aneurysm and was not expected to live through the night.  He lived in Utah.  I live in North Carolina.  All I could do was pace the floor and wonder.  In a nutshell, he did pull through, coming out on the other side of a huge brain surgery with paralysis on one side of his body, complete loss of his speach (just kidding) speech and swallowing abilities, incontinent, with near blindness on one side.  He had no one to care for him out there.  As his oldest child, I had him med-evac’d here and went on to be his power of attorney and oversee his care for the next six years before he died.

Was that enough on my plate?  Apparently not.

My husband had two invasive heart procedures in two years, and a few other things I won’t even mention here — they sort of pale in comparison to heart surgery, but I was literally about to implode going back to the first couple of years of overseeing my dad’s care. 

Anyone who reads my blog knows that I am a high-energy person.  I can hardly sit still.  I am always doing something.  It’s one project done and on to the next one.  My children fuss at me for not resting, but it’s just the way I’m wired.  I think if I really wanted to, I could still homeschool all of my school-aged children and work, but at some point I stopped thinking it was a good idea for us.

I woke up one day and realized that my children needed not just a homeschool mommy but a mommy!  They needed to see me happy and healthy and enjoying some personal interests.  It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying homeschooling, but my entire life was consumed with working and lesson plans.  Also, because of my work schedule, it was very hard logistically to get all the children to various activities that I wanted them involved with.  It was choppy.  It made work even harder.

Also, even though we’d had a less-than-stellar experience at the first public school we encountered, I was never anti-public-school.  I think there are some fabulous teachers out there, just as much as there are some fabulous homeschools, and the freedom needs to be there to do either one!

I became proactive in trying to find a public school that I could be satisfied with.  We looked at a couple of charter schools.  We called several private schools.  We checked on a little school that’s run by a local university.  We looked at the public schools our children could go to.  We went to visit a sweet little Waldorf school.   

Religious or Academic or Emotional?

This might be a good time for me to say that I do not homeschool for religious reasons.  My reasons were academic somewhat, but mostly for the emotional well-being of my children.  It did not seem healthy to me that a 2nd grader was wondering why he was born because of stress over reading and yet his teacher couldn’t spell well.

I want to bring this in because I know people who homeschool for religious reasons and would never — for any reason other than death — throw in the towel.  I respect that.

I think homeschooling is one of the most beautiful, most successful forms of education on the planet. 

Today

I did decide on what I think is the perfect school for two of my children.  My second son is a senior in our homeschool.  I would not trade homeschooling my dyslexic son for anything.  It has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.  His favorite pasttime is reading now.  He just finished reading Shogun.  He is beginning a study of the Japanese language and I am so excited to see how far he’ll go with it!

He has thrived at home.  He is a very quiet, very introspective person.  He loves being alone.  He was wilting in public school.  He needed years to learn to read well.  Homeschooling has been the perfect fit for him. 

I also would not trade the years I spent homeschooling the two who are now in a more public school setting.  We had some great years of learning together.  And they may yet come home again.  We evaluate everything every year and we do get input from the children.

Balance?

Oh yes, I was supposed to talk about balance.  How do I balance homeschool and public school?  In all actuality, sending two of my children to public school brought balance to our lives.  The two I sent fit into the public school setting well.  They both love being in a group setting and they are both bright academically.

I would be lying if I said there had not been times when I’ve felt sad over not being able to homeschool all of my children all the way through, but life has not given me the situation in which to do it well, and doing it well is very important. 

The school my children are in is simply amazing!  The teachers are amazing.  The music program and foreign language and special ed programs (though these two don’t need it) are amazing.  It’s all good.

Some Tips

• I always run my homeschool on the same schedule as the school my PS children are in.  That way, we are all doing school on the same days.  A day off is a day off for everyone! 
• When I can, I join our local homeschool group for a fieldtrip, even including my PS students.  (This might not work for everyone, but I was involved in my local group for a few years and they know that if I could have followed my heart I’d not be working so much and I’d have all my children at home even today.)
• I do as much volunteering as I can at the school.  For a time, my oldest homeschool student actually volunteered in the PE program at the public school.  It was a great experience. 
• I still have all my Five In A Row Books so that Princess of the Universe and I can “row.”  She loves it!  There are teachers at the public school who use FIAR actually.  One even used to homeschool.
• I apply the homeschooling/learning lifestyle to our home no matter what, which helps all of our children, not just the HS students.
• I evaluate every child, year by year, and I’m always open to change.
• I am so involved in my children’s lives, it feels sometimes like I’m still homeschooling them all.  We do much together, like our dollhouse lessons, nature studies, garden photography, walks.  It doesn’t have to feel like you’ve disconnected to send a child to public school.
• If there is a certain homeschool style you love, i.e. I adore Charlotte Mason’s ideas, then incorporate it into your whole lifestyle. 

Whew that was long.  And I probably did not really answer anyone’s questions.  But now you know.  You know the whole long story.  You know what’s going on here school-wise.

Lynn

PS — Please feel free to leave comments and questions.  We can turn this into a great permanent dialogue.