Recently, within my local homeschool group, the questions about a typical day, whether to put kids in public school, and are they learning enough at home have been discussed back and forth on our email loop. All the answers were very encouraging, but there were a couple recently from graduated students that I found especially fun.
Sara (mother of Ricky) shared:
Today, he was asked by his Bureaucracy In Government class professor to please see him after class. Well, Ricky was quite worried as you can well imagine.
When class was over, the teacher explained to Ricky that he was in the middle of his dissertation and lacks quite a bit, feels his paper is horrible, has to turn it in sooner than he wishes, hasn’t been able to get enough sleep, etc. He went to explain that Ricky’s paper he’d just graded was one of the best papers he’d ever read, going on to site the grammar, sentence structure, valid arguments made in the paper, etc. He then asked Ricky if he could come back this afternoon to help him clean up his paper and maybe give him some help with the final 20 pages he HAS to get written.
Y’all, this is a DISSERTATION, not just any ole paper.
Of course, to give complete credit, Shelby [his wife, who also just graduated from homeschool] also edits Ricky’s papers most of the time. She would have done work on Ricky’s paper the professor read and graded. But, then again, you have another homeschooler at work!
For all of you out there, be encouraged, please. I can’t put myself in the shoes of you who have more children than me. I can’t help you with making a decision of what to do this year or next year. But I can tell you stories like the one above. Oh, and both Ricky and Shelby are going to college on academic scholarships.
As mothers of homeschoolers, you all know that’s not tooting my own horn, that’s giving credit to the students. They are the ones who have learned how to learn. They are the ones who have learned how to study. They are the ones doing the work given them. Really, we give them the tools and hope to create a love for learning. If we can accomplish that love, we’ve done our job and done it well.
Danielle shared:
I was down at the barn feeding this morning when I received a picture text from Laura. It was a picture of a Mycobacterium smegmatis. No, I didn’t know what that was either, but she was very excited about it. You see, she is taking Micro Biology this semester at NCTC, and evidently she was able to find this on her own during lab.
I am telling you this story to illustrate the point of this email. There have been a lot of emails about typical school days and whether or not we are doing right by our kids. One of the things that Mike always told me when I had doubts was that our job as parents is to raise responsible, well educated adults. Well educated does not always mean that the kids graduate knowing everything there is to know, but rather they know how to find the information that they need and I think most importantly, they have a love for learning. I knew we had accomplished this when Laura announced that she had chosen a career of being a full time student!!
The point of this whole email is to say, if over their 18 years with us we take more time teaching them to love learning I don’t see how we can go wrong. So to all the moms out there that are stressing over the new school year and teaching everything they should be learning, take a deep breath and enjoy teaching them what they are trying to learn today and put tomorrow in God’s hands. This is just my thoughts, I don’t know everything, and everyone who knows us knows that my kids are not perfect, but from a retired home school mom, it really will be OK.
If these stories are encouraging, please visit my group’s site, Red River Christian Homeschoolers, for more stories on a typical day, meeting the families, and graduates. Coming soon, we will feature marriages of three (count ’em: THREE) couples who were all graduates from our group!
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