I’m going to let you in on a little secret, this is what homeschoolers really do:

We get up at 7am, get dressed, eat breakfast. We check our emails while the kids read. Then we head for the barn before we do the schoolwork.

Yes, the mysterious world of homeschooling is open for your review. At least the mysterious world of how it works in our house.

The 'classroom' at Tina's house.

It would make me happy to tell you that we don’t do any boring bookwork, that what we do is fun and creative and crafty and therefore my children will remember it forever. But that would be a lie. We do use textbooks for a lot of what we do. My 18-year-old son is finishing up Geometry and US History using Life of Fred textbooks and a video course from The Teaching Company. Four days per week, the kids have to sit down and do some typical, schooly stuff like work sheets and spelling tests because that’s how I have set things up.

As homeschooling becomes more and more mainstream, the stories of how families come to it become more varied and more interesting. Our family decided to homeschool after some horrible interactions in Public Schools, both with faculty (for example, once they denied any wrong doing after one of our sons partially tortiated a testicle while doing 200 punishment sit ups with his PE class,) as well as with students. We are not Christian. We live a fairly traditional lifestyle. We are a little crunchy and do a lot of gardening and sometimes raise livestock for meat. Our kids want to go to college, or have gone and graduated, or are going now.  When we meet new people, they are often surprised to hear that we are homeschoolers as we don’t fit the denim jumper stereotype.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to address the subject of homeschooling without also touching on the topic of ‘socialization.’ This seems to be the buzzword for people who are suspicious of homeschooling but don’t really know much about it. Somehow Average Joe thinks that it is a good thing to isolate our children in age-identical groups and to have them look to one authority to tell them everything they need to know and to never question the information they are offered. If that is what Average Joe thinks socialization is, most homeschoolers would disagree. Homeschool parents tend to believe that socialization is endowing our children with the ability to function in a variety of social settings with many people of different ages. My kids have proven themselves to be equally competent while interacting with a tour guide in the Blue Mosque, listening to band in a biker bar or hiking the Appalachian Trail with a group of kids from A.R.E.

Homeschooled child at work.

To my mind, and the collective minds of many homeschoolers, that is precisely what we think the goal of socialization is. I’ll go a step farther and suggest that what Average Joe calls socialization is more like brainwashing.

Homeschooled children, of necessity, live in a world that is not solely child-focused. They go to doctor’s appointments, the bank, the grocery store. They are at home to see the laundry being done, the vacuuming, the cooking. They develop life skills simply by immersion in the world they share with their families each day. Most homeschool families have one parent working outside the home and one parent who stays home and does everything else. Mostly, the at-home parents are mothers but there are fathers who do it, too.

But I was telling you about what we do, wasn’t I? Once we finish up at the barn, we come home and have lunch and then the schoolwork gets done. I keep a schedule with assignments for each child on a dry erase board and they check tasks off as they are completed. What sorts of things do they study? Latin, Mathematics, Writing, History, Science, just like schooled kids.

The school subjects really don’t take up that much time with only one child to focus on. The subject of life? Well, that’s a different story.