Homeschooling

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What are your thoughts on it? Has anybody done it or wish they had?

I was homeschooled, had a shockingly poor education, but still was able to go to college and excel with lots of hard work and diligence.

During my middle and high school years, I was home by myself most of the time and did schoolwork when I felt like it. The amount of time I spent doing schoolwork amounted to two hours or less a day. I tended to do a lot for a couple days and then do nothing for weeks at a time, except reading. I loved to read. I’d make reading lists for myself that consisted of books from the English literary cannon and work my way through those and then I’d make a new list. There was, of course, excessive video game playing as well as hiking in the woods that were, for a time, right outside our back door.

Math was probably my worst subject. I only had basic arithmetic - no geometry or algebra. I only had open book tests and wrote no papers for any subject. I learned nothing about evolution and very little about science in general.

I was able to overcome all of that and had a very successful time in college, graduating with highest honors.

What I haven’t been able to overcome as well is not having had much opportunity to work on social skills. Now that I have a son of my own, it’s even more amazing to me that my parents thought this way of life was a sensible option. Sometimes I suspect that if I had had a normal school experience I would’ve had subclinical autistic symptoms and wouldn’t have been diagnosed with autism at all. It’s like my parents’ end goal was to make me as weird as possible.

I know that many have had horrible experiences in high school but maybe that’s better than no experiences at all. What do you think?

I wish I'd been home schooled. I absolutely hated school and I went to both public and private schools. This is not an exaggeration: The last day of high school is literally still among the top of the happiest days in my life and always will be.

One of the things that shape Aspies is bullying. It produces overwhelming stress that we are physically not capable of dealing with. For males this peaks during Junior High School for females it peaks during High School. It is a transitionary time to adulthood. After the peak, bullying tends to drop off significantly. But the scars never fade. [I am 70 years old and the scars are still buried deep down inside me.] Many Aspies have their sense of self worth completely destroyed like a shredder. Some never recover.

So my impression is that home schooling removes a child from a school setting during this peak. It means that they are not subjected to the stress of being bullied. Many are less impacted for the rest of their lives by this removal. The Aspies that I have met in person and over the Internet tend to agree that home schooling was very beneficial for them.

Case in point. There is a town not too distant from mine. A few years ago, a girl in that town committed suicide. She was constantly bullied at school. She was in high school and had to take P.E. The final straw for her came when her peer group began criticizing the underwear that she wore. Apparently they wore expensive underwear and flaunted it whereas she didn't. Such a trivial thing but that stress ended her life. [Of course for years she was probably told she was worthless, stupid, an idiot and would never amount to anything and this was the final straw that broke the camels back.] Bullying is very destructive and it is better to not be on the receiving side.

I was homeschooled for 7th and 8th grade and it was an AMAZING change for me. I loved it. I also like my current charter school.

It depends on who you and your parents are I'm sure though.

Homeschooling mostly sucked for me, but that's because I was raised in an area where homeschooling was just a parenting tactic used to prevent your kids from absorbing the "liberal agenda." What exactly this agenda was and what it had to do with climate change, my textbooks never told me.

I fudging hated science and history in school. The textbooks were laughably wrong. Let me entertain you with a passage from a science book:

That’s absolutely nuts to put that in a textbook for school.

I’m fortunate my textbooks were more objective than that.

I wasn't homeschooled, but I'm quite interested in it as an educational movement/phenomenon. It's estimated that there are now well over a million homeschoolers in the US.

I kinda wished I was. It would've saved a lot of money and pain.

Yet my parents... They're clueless. Might not be better or even worse than any teachers I've encountered. Especially that my then mom isn't always what she is now.
They wouldn't know how to handle me, nor capable of pulling it off.

Though it would've been cool if dad, my grandpa, and my greatgranpa decided to teach me a bit of their jobs -- oh, except who would've taught a little girl carpentry, electronics, mechanics, and plumbing??? Animal husbandry, nursing and bookkeeping, maybe, but I won't be as willing...
On top of it, the majority at that time likely didn't knew the concept of homeschooling at all.


While it's legal, I wonder when the concept of homeschooling would be more popular here..?

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I was home schooled for 8th and 9th. My curriculum was largely based around Equine. I had been completely fried out in public school, so largely anything that was too much like that tended to send me into a meltdown or shutdown. So my mother had to get a bit creative at times. My mother had worried that we hdn't done enough but when it came to the end of the year evaluation it was more than enough. Which really makes me wonder why they have to jam as much crap as they do down your throat in public school >_>

I had wanted to be home schooled prior to when I was but that was mostly based on me just wanting to escape what I was currently in vs thinking it would be better for me. I don't know if it was overall better or not, but I do know that I needed that time to try to reset my brain from immediately shutting down at being faced with 'school work'.

When I did go 'back into the system' it was into an alternative school. They tried to get me to go back into the mainstream but I had panic attacks, which prevented that. Where I ended up wasn't 'right' for me but I was able to graduate. I think being in that setting had some pluses to being home schooled but it also lacked some aspects of the mainstream that probably would have benefited me.

Homeschooling's advantage was in the fact that I could go at my own pace, and I didn't have that feeling that I was competing with anyone else. It was also easy to alter things so it was in a way that I learned better vs the standard. The best part was there wasn't any of the BS that comes from other people. Crappy peers, and blaming teachers did not exist.

I wasn't homeschooled, but my mom read to me a lot when I was a little girl and instilled in me an early love of reading.