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Best of Homeschool: Self-Guided Education

In pursuit of a good education for my 6 children, I tried several avenues:

1. Let the schools take care of it;

2. Send them to school but keep in touch with the teachers;

3. Send them to a small hands-on private school;

4. Teach at the small hands-on private school;

5. Send them to a big expensive private school;

6. Volunteer-teach at the big expensive private school;

7. Take them out of all the above and educate them at home.

No one child went through all of these phases of mine, but the last few got the best education...

The decision to take them out of school was in part due to my being really tired of putting up with all the collateral guff of having a kid in school. I'm talking about missing homework, report cards, detention, parties invited to or not, friends good and enemies bad, competition, teacher conferences, testing, silly rules, sensible rules, and lots and lots of spin.

Another nudge toward keeping them home came the day I stood in the middle-school office waiting to talk to the principal before we transferred our daughter there. The bell rang, kids came racing out of classes, lockers banged, girls combed their hair in front of their locker mirrors, smacked gum at each other, and ignored the late bell - and I realized 10 minutes had gone by, all wasted.

The final straw was an opportunity we had one year to travel extensively. Except the kids were in school. But what if...?

What if they didn't go to school, but came with us? Or more realistically, what if they didn't go to school, and we could do that traveling (because we would never have left them behind)?

I began to take that question seriously. I heard of a university that had a program for the children of traveling professionals, at an affordable price. The trouble was that the program was for grades 9 through 12, and our kids were then in grades 7 and 8. Fortunately they were given an interview and accepted.

In this program they did worksheets, studied, read, and when they were ready, they sent a portion of what they had done to the appropriate university instructor. At the end of the course they took a test monitored by an official testing center. Most of the work they were to do was not going to be seen by anyone - it was just there to teach them the principles of the course. The grade depended on only the few required assignments, plus the test.

So we headed out on our travels with the first several courses in hand, and really quite unprepared in any other way

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