Long ago, in the dawn of time...

Okay, it wasn't the dawn of time. It was July 2019. It was right about when the speed button on my life got pushed to 2x and didn't slow down for the next three months. And it was when somebody we all know told me to write about my homeschooled experience.

Now it's October and I'm crossing things little by little off my to-do list, and getting supreme thrills out of crossing two things off and having one new thing show up instead of crossing one off and having two show up.

So here I am, at midnight, reflecting on a power-outage, Caitlin's Adventures, and my homeschool career.

I did write part of this earlier buuut it was long and super rambly and I don't know if I'll bother to find it again. If Night wants it she can ask for it and I'll send it to her of course.

I probably forgot about fifty things worth mentioning. Writing about a homeschooled life is hard because where does the homeschooled part leave off? Nobody knows.

***

ACADEMIC OVERVIEW

I learned most of school through reading. My mom read to me (and my dad to a lesser extent) my entire babyhood and through middle school, until 10th grade or so when I started taking most of my classes on myself. I'm told I learned to read when I was four, but I don't actually remember a time when I couldn't read. I remember my mom teaching me words in the phonics book and glancing to the very end of the book to see something about Julia, not knowing I was "reading", but simply seeing and understanding. (She told me I wouldn't be able to read those pages yet, and not knowing that what I was doing was reading, and being a four-year-old with implicit faith in my mother's judgment, I believed her.)

After she coached me through the phonics book, I was a hopeless bookworm, and I would read anything anyone gave me. Within a year or two, virtually nothing was beyond my comprehension level or interest.

When I was five, my mom started a curriculum called Sonlight with me, which our family continues to use to this day. It takes a literature-based approach to learning, which worked perfectly with me. Sonlight itself focuses mainly on studying history, literature, and creative writing, but also lists varied math, handwriting, and elective sources in its catalog to complete the schooling prep.

Our school days were not highly structured. I would listen to my mom read history and stories and answer a couple comprehension questions. Sometimes go over a bit of vocab. Sonlight had a teacher's guide for suggested comprehension questions and word study. Our history books (written by Susan Wise Bauer) also had teacher manuals that I loved looking through for all the alluring crafts within their pages. Sometimes my mom would send the manual with my dad to his workplace, and he would copy her requested page and bring it back so we could color a map of England, or make elaborately costumed paper dolls of Justinius and Theodora. My own assigned reading, of course, was a joke. I blew through a year's worth in a few days. The day of the year that the schoolbooks came was a highlight because it meant I would have new reading material for a week.

None of this ever felt like an effort, a competition, or even a game. It was life. And it was fun.

I think I was six when I had the first inkling that school was something with expectations. In the middle of answering comprehension questions, something so routine that this is the ONLY memory I have of it, I suddenly realized that I was supposed to know these things, and that there was a great deal more out there that I would need to know by a certain time. The concept of needing to keep pace was born.

Typically, it didn't bother me. Being a kid who liked to listen to grownups, especially if I was the subject of conversation, I realized that I was highly competent in everything I was learning. But a niggling fear sometimes surfaced: What if there was something I needed to know about, but didn't? What if I missed one of those need-to-check boxes en route to... whatever adult life held?

I was seven the first time I received a math book. I now know that it's typically wise to hold back on formal math instruction until age seven or so. I however experienced an instant surge of that niggling worry, because upon turning to the rear of the book, I saw numbers arranged in patterns that I could not interpret. The text was scant and I had no idea what the book was asking me to do. I knew that the time had come. One of those holes in my education had been overlooked. I was Behind.

Well, my dad thought I was crazy for trying to do the problems in the back, but he told me what I was supposed to do and instantly my mind was set at ease. Oh, this just meant to subtract the numbers.

This was a recurring pattern in my educational experience. I would be shown something new, freak out because I didn't know what they were asking, and find out that I already knew how it worked. This was the case, for instance, with grammar, which I studied a textbook for at age eleven. It taught me very little that I did not already know, but it did give me names for the things I already knew, and the logic that governed them.

Having breezed through third, fourth, and fifth-grade math in about a semester each, I ran into issues with my mathbook in the sixth-grade edition. They were giving me algebra word problems with zero explanation. So we switched curriculums to Teaching Textbooks and got me algebra. This took me two and a half years to complete, and I got an overall B in it, but A's in both geometry and Algebra II. And that's my math history. The reason I know my grade in math but absolutely nothing else is because Teaching Textbooks is done on computer and has an automatic grading system.

I learned handwriting with the Getty-Dubay system. I was a perfectionist and cried because I couldn't replicate the examples precisely. My handwriting was tiny, neat, and elegant until I was about 17, when it started to slide downhill. I'm currently re-training myself to hold a pencil properly, so maybe I can regain lost ground. ;-;

As I moved into high school, my school courses expanded from the typical history/literature/arithmetic base that had governed my elementary years. My workload was still minimal, especially when you took into account that my assigned reading was more like pleasure, and I worried that I was not doing enough. Again the old concern that I was missing something integral returned. It felt like things should be harder.

And maybe they should've? One of my sisters is taking an HSLDA English course online, and doing more academic work than I did in most of my high school years put together. I sometimes wish I had had more structure, more pressure, more assignments, just to know that I could have done it. I longed to prove myself to myself.

But it wasn't as if I wasn't learning.

I took the typical high school courses -- the only one I somehow missed was chemistry, which I do have a theoretical knowledge of (the periodic table is so much fun), but am not sorry to have skipped out on the formulas and experiments.

When I was thirteen, I attended a church-wide economics class hosted by one of our elders on Wednesday nights. While I did not participate in the written homework, I burned through the reading material and watched the videos each week.

My friend took two years of Latin under her mom's tutelage. Her mom offered to teach me at the same time, and I jumped at the chance. We went through the first two books of Cambridge Latin, and after that it was Lation 101: Learning a Classical Language, which is supposed to be college level but I would HIGHLY recommend for junior or senior highschoolers.

My biggest worry was that I never wrote an essay (until finally in my senior year I went to Classical Conversations and had to write 12). Every year I pestered my mom to assign me one and she said, "Write one about whatever you want." When I said I needed to know how to write one, she couldn't give my perfectionist brain enough specifics to satisfy me, and the essay was just never written.

You're probably wondering why I didn't just surf the dang web and figure it out. Well, until my senior year I was internet-shy. I flatly didn't care about it. I found Facebook interesting in 2014 when I got it, boring in 2015, and so sickeningly political in 2016 that I just about quit getting on it altogether. And Facebook was the only thing I used the internet for. I read something as a kid about the danger of letting children search and browse unsupervised, and it impressed upon my impressionable young soul as though I had been pointed out the path to hell. Besides that, I was just apathetic towards it. I'd never needed the internet for anything. I had no interest in making myself need it. And I was not without a little self-conceit at my lack of Internet reliance. Even my mom had an Instagram and a Pinterest. Pah, said I. I needed no Instagram or Pinterest. They had no siren call upon my soul.

Well, I got Wattpad, and we all know how that turns out...

I had full plans to attend college for a while (leading Night to think that I'm living a deprived life now) and took the ACT twice in 2017. The scores I got eased my concerns about not having the knowledge I needed, but my essay scores SUCKED, which validated my concerns in that area. I still fret about it sometimes. Surely the essays weren't that bad... ;-;

As mentioned, I attended a semi-local Classical Conversations group for my senior year of high school. That gave me some of the structure I'd been craving, though CC refuses to grade work and says that's the parent's responsibility. Well, yeah, no, my parents have never graded anything... so that wasn't happening anytime soon. CC cost me $1500 out of my own bank account, and I came out of it with new friends, a couple theology debates, public speaking and essay-writing experience, and memories of driving blowsy winter roads while singing Clamavi de Profundis songs with my sister. Pretty good deal.

And then what? Did my education quit? In September 2018, right on cue, it picked up again, frens. Except I didn't get a summer break, because publishing and marketing do not wait for summer breaks. This learning curve has been so busy, and so hard, and yet I'm glad about it. For the first time, I have what I want: a challenge.

I wanted college for the learning, for the challenge, and for the proof that I could meet that challenge. Well, screw college. I don't need it for any of those things. Not one bit.

(College is cool, y'all. If you need it for what you want to do in life you should totally go. My mom and dad are both college graduates and I'm proud as a peacock on their behalf. But college don't rule this here girl)

SOCIAL OVERVIEW

idk y'all, Night talked a whole lot about her social life so I guess I should too?

When I was six, my world was narrow. I think most kids' worlds are at that age. I don't think it matters if you're a public schooler or a homeschooler, you are the biggest thing in your world by a LONG shot when you're a kid, and that means your world is narrow. Mine was especially narrow, though, when I lived in Ohio. Interaction was segregated at my church; there were cliques. Not saying it was a bad church, much less that the cliques were deliberately exclusive, they were just there and I took it for granted. The big girls played together, the big boys played together, the little girls played together, the little boys played... well, the little boys were everywhere. And the grownups talked with each other, unless they were Sunday School teachers. (My mom says that I was shy. Funny, I don't remember being shy. I had so much to say and I would have said it all in a heartbeat if I had realized any grownup was offering me the chance.)

Then we moved from Ohio to Michigan, from a 200-person church to a 50-person church, and so many things changed. I began to interact regularly with people on all ages of the spectrum, and grew to know my friends much more intimately than surface relationships. I'm not ashamed to say that my church was my community and my life.

When I was 14, I overheard something at a presbytery-wide youth retreat that shocked and briefly incensed me. The gist of the conversation was, "Can you imagine being homeschooled? Ugh it would be so isolated. Imagine missing out on a social life. Those poor kids."

It was the only homeschool prejudice I ever heard, and it wasn't even directed at me (though I have later wondered if it were just some homeschooled kids mocking the stock anti-homeschooler accusations). But it was so illogical I had to laugh. Me? Isolated? I had a life bursting at the seams with energy, friendship, and fulfillment, and it was my church family that provided it all.

With my church family, I learned to engage in respectful but animated conversation with my elders. Adults talked to me and cared about what I had to say. (Honestly, in my teenage years, when outside my immediate circles I preferred talking with adults because they were the ones who could hold a conversation that wasn't about the latest movie I hadn't seen. XD)

With my church family, I learned that you can be friends with people who hold different views from you. One family had stricter standards than mine. Another was more lax in many areas. None of us homeschooled exactly the same way. One family sent their son to public school. Some families were against drinking alcohol, while others weren't. Not very big differences, maybe, but they have caused division. I learned that they don't have to, because every day of my life I witnessed loving fellowship with all those people to one another.

With my church family, I learned what I believe and why I believe it. About a year ago, I stopped attending the high-school SS class and started teaching the youngest group. It was only after I stopped attending that I realized the full effort my incredible teacher had put into teaching us week after week, grounding us in Biblical principles and making us ready to "give an answer to anyone who asks". I learned that sometimes we do divide over issues, and why, but that division doesn't always have to mean dissolution of fellowship.

With my church family, I was always included. I went to the birthday parties which I based Caitlin's (more lavish) one off of. I went to sleepovers. I took piano lessons from my favorite Sunday School teacher. Someone was always willing to babysit when my parents needed to be gone -- sometimes for days at a time. I took horse lessons at 13 from my 21-year-old best friend. I got invited for "work dates" at the farm, because at the farm, work is where the fun is at and if you've never stone-picked a field with a crew of besties, you're missing out. We had Jane Austen movie nights with our moms and Tolkien movie nights without them. We formed a youth choir (more like an ensemble) and kept it together for almost four years. And that's not even talking about all the stuff my siblings got invited to that I was too busy for. I lived such a full and vivid life, it could hardly have been more so.

I should be free with the fact that there was much of my life that was not "normal". At 14, I was "un-cultured" and knew it, and was more than a little proud of it. (Because when you're 14, hypercritical and hormonal, you pretty much have to be proud of some stupid thing) (NO OFFENSE TO ALL THE 14-YEAR-OLDS ON HERE, I PROMISE, THIS IS ENTIRELY SELF-REFERENTIAL) I was never in any homeschool co-ops. I didn't participate in most "community events" and didn't want to. I had one non-church friend, my next-door neighbor. The only popular thing I knew at age 12 was Lord of the Rings. By some standards, I was indeed an isolated homeschooler.

But guys, I was so busy living life.

My world may have been narrow, but if so, it was also very deep. Deep enough that when my horizons expanded, I was ready to meet whatever came my way.

I honestly wouldn't trade that for any other life.