Why I homeschool

Woo-Hoo! I have managed to get a background, and play with fonts and colors! You know those things are much more important than content, right?

So, back to the homeschool journey. We moved from Hampton, VA to Chicopee, MA last August because the Army decided we needed the excitement of a new home. This was a hard move in some ways. We loved Virginia. We lived seven miles from Yorktown Battlefield, about fifteen miles from Williamsburg, just a few minutes from the Virginia Living Museum and the Mariners Museum. We had a very, very nice house on base at Langley, and our daughter was in a fantastic school system. She was tested first in Kindergarten for the Primary Enrichment Program, and was accepted into that. It never dawned on me before that she might be gifted. I knew she was high energy, but didn't act like the ADHD kids I knew. I knew she could hyperfocus on ideas and things she wanted to know and explore, but not like the ASD kids I knew. She was just my kid--bright, bubbly, curious, and soaking up the world like a sponge. The school saw something in her that I had just assumed was normal for her and asked permission to test her and asked me to fill out a form that asked strange questions, like about her sense of humor...I had no idea that being a smart alec had something to do with being gifted! She was in the PEP program for k-2 and was then tested again to determine whether she was actually gifted. Umm, yeah. Kind of scary-gifted. She tested at Highly Gifted. 99th plus percentiles. eep. Thank God the school had a great program and great teachers who were up on differentiating learning and dealing with gifted children, their asyncronosities and their roller coaster emotions. Mrs. Lord, Mrs. Reader, Mrs England, Mrs. Lamanque, Mrs Carter, and Ms Baggett will always have my grateful prayers for the way they loved and treated my daughter.

And then we moved to Chicopee, MA. I was excited about the move. Although we would be further away from my in-laws, which wasn't for happy-making, we would be closer to our older daughter, closer to friends from the SCA, back into an SCA Kingdom that I knew and understood...it wasn't PA but it was closer to home and a culture I knew and understood. And Massachusetts would be cool we thought! We had spent a lot of time at Yorktown, now we could see Lexington and Concord. We were trading Jamestown for Plymouth, Williamsburg for Sturbridge and Deerfield. There were lots of cool and interesting thing to see and visit and learn about! It was going to be great! And then dd (darling daughter) started school. By the third day I was trying to make an appointment to talk to the teacher because she was already coming home in tears--the teacher had torn up her paper, threw it away, and yelled at her in front of everyone! It seems she committed the unforgivable sin of doing her homework paper in class after she had finished her classwork. This happened a few more times before we could manage to fit in a meeting with the teacher as her schedule was busy. By the time we did meet, I will admit that I was angry. There was constantly something wrong with my child's work, her behavior, everything--and I wasn't hearing it from my child. I was being told by the other neighborhood kids that she had gotten yelled at and she hadn't done anything wrong. When I would ask her about it, she would back up the stories I had heard, but increasingly she was seeing that she was being yelled at because she was stupid and a bad person. After I met with the teacher and loaned her a book about dealing with gifted children, explained what reaction dd was having to her behavior (and she jumped on me for calling her a bully--which she was since much of bullying is defined by the reaction of the victim), I came home with a bit of hope that things would be ok. I should have known it wasn't going to be when the book came home with dd that afternoon with a note that said "I don't need to read this, it is just common sense." Three days after our meeting she again turned on dd in class--this time over not sitting still and quiet when she had finished her work--even though I had asked her to give my child extra work so she wouldn't be disruptive. I was told no, they didn't do that as it wasn't fair to the other children to allow one to get ahead. I should have taken her out of school then, but I believe in the Public School System and just demanded that she be moved to another classroom. They finally managed to get her into the gifted program also, and the gifted teacher did as much as she could for the kids for the 45 minutes a week she had them. Once she got into the program though, it was constantly held over her head that it was a privilege, and that any teacher could have her removed from it if they decided she didn't behave well enough/ didn't work hard enough/ didn't get good enough grades on projects or tests...basically for any reason they could dream up. This added to her stress, and by November we had reached the point that she was sick more days than not, and I was feeding her pepto bismal before sending her off to school. It seems that the bullying behavior of the teacher hadn't stopped when she was moved to another class. The teacher had poisoned the well, and my child, who was known and loved by all the teachers in York County who came in contact with her, was now the object and the scapegoat for everything that went wrong, whether she was involved or not. It seems when you are the new kid, and the object of the teachers derision and bullying, it allows the kids to bully you too. Her lunchbox was taken and thrown on the roof. The seat of her bike was slashed. She was pushed into walls and tripped in the hall. And the teachers did nothing about it. She spent recess sitting by herself and not playing because it was safer that way. And most of this I learned from other kids--by this point, mine was believing she deserved it.

The final straw was when we went in for the Parent/Teacher conference in December. At that point we saw her grades, which were all good, except for the citizenship type grades, which were all bad. We were informed that she would not sit down, she would not do her classwork, she would not behave, she did not use her time wisely, that she had to be kept in from recess a number of times so that she could do the before school work she hadn't got done that morning. At this point I interrupted to say that she was probably doing that on purpose so that she didn't have to go to the playground and told her of some of the incidents there. That was when I found out that the teachers do not supervise the playground, lunchroom, or halls. I was shocked. Then the woman had the audacity to tell me that they (the teachers) had decided that dd was either ADHD or ASD and that I needed to get her into a Dr and get her on medication. That was the final straw. I informed the ignorant twit that she had been tested in VA when she was tested for the gifted program, and the response I got was "I'm sorry Mrs. Butler, she isn't ADHD or ASD. She is simply Highly Gifted, and they don't make a pill for that."

I came home from the Parent/Teacher conference and started researching what to do to get her out of that school spawned from the depths of hell and begin homeschooling. The district told me I had to keep her in until the next board meeting, but that since Christmas break was coming up, and no one would really notice if I didn't send her back the 3 days in January, I could pull her as soon as break started. I really didn't want to leave her there for another week and a half, but I legally had no choice.

Scrambling for a curriculum and knowing nothing about what was available, I had her take the Calvert placement test and enrolled her in their 4th Grade mid-year ATS program. She has a test every 20 lessons that is sent into a certified teacher along with a couple of essays, a book report, or other writing sample for grading. She receives a certificate of completion at the end of the grade, and everything is transferable to a public school if we move somewhere we can send her back. It is a really good, demanding program, and I have done my best to follow it faithfully. We will be doing Calvert again for 5th grade, but math is up in the air. I want to advance her to 6th grace math, as I am tired of her being either bored or teaching me the lesson. If Calvert won't allow me to do that, I am going to order math separately and use Life of Fred Fractions and Decimals, which are lead-ins for pre-Algebra. I am also going to be doing a lot more Charlotte Mason style teaching while using Calvert as a spine--she is fully capable of taking that information and interacting with it on a higher level by notebooking and other activities.  I am sure she would do well with any curriculum I put together however I know my child and she needs the accountability of those tests and the assurance of the certificate. I also know that Calvert is highly respected and will give her a fantastic foundation for high school. So I supplement. A lot. I had to do it when she was in a wonderful public school, it will just be even easier homeschooling, because I can be sure to tie all the "fun stuff" into what she is learning instead of it just being for fun and her not having the schema to make the connections. It is going to be a good fun year. I have learned so much since January about her learning style, how to excite her even with things she doesn't like and doesn't see a reason to learn (like spelling), and I have done a lot of research. I have wish lists at all sorts of places so that I can go and grab supplementary curriculum as I need it. I have bookmarked blogs of good teachers, and am reading them and learning constantly. I have a supportive on-line community at Secular Homeschool, and two other homeschool families on my street.

Now if I were just younger, did not have a chronic disorder that disrupts my life, and had a lot more energy....but as long as we are wishing for the impossible, how about a big lottery win too?