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Home Schooling Boot Camp

I loaded my self-contained bookcase, two plastic tubs full of belongings, and my saddle into my '69 Ford Galaxy, then nursed the quirky engine to life. I was college bound. Would I be able to handle the expectations, the standards, the social pressures? What kinds of jobs would I be able to obtain?

I was home schooled from birth. I had two public classroom memories, neither one pleasant. But, other members of my family had gone to college, and survived. I could too.

I found I had been well prepared. The homework was a yoke easy to bear, and I soon found myself a leader among my peers. In part, this was due to my willingness to be eccentric - I received many questions about the thirty-ought-six brasses I wore on a chain about my neck (a gift from my husband-to-be, in commemoration of our first target practice together.) But there was something else, and I soon put it down to my upbringing.

My father and mother were small-town public school graduates, and met each other at college. They were both farm kids. And they had a reverence for knowledge used rightly. They introduced my three siblings and I to 1,000's of topics, formally and informally. They were both in constant study, and experimented to improve their souls. We knew how to make good butter, assist a cow with a difficult birth, train a horse, grow a garden, slaughter a beef, overhaul an engine, drive a tractor, and shoot an M-16. We had opportunities to weld, sew, cook and bake, read the classics, and learn a variety of house construction skills. (Dad is an outstanding cabinetmaker and machinist.)

Then there were the more personal interests we were encouraged to pursue, like oil painting, skateboarding, bull riding, radio airplane building, story writing, musical instruments, and ballet and jazz dance. We had much time to devote to hobbies and business ideas and skills, as, by Colorado law and our own inclination, it only took four hours a day to clear the required academics out of the way.

All of us run our own businesses now, blasting the need to answer to an employer.

We took involvement in politics for granted - seeing Mom at the dining room table, deep in talk with a State Senator over education, was nothing to blink at.

And the social scene? Well, every time my brother Noah walked into a room, cheers drowned out whatever had been going on. I, too, had a long list of companions, and my sisters, a few cherished friends of their choosing. We were involved in clubs, camps, church and youth group activities (including teaching), and claimed one another as friends. We knew how to talk to adults, toddlers, and anyone in between, and considered our parents friends and encouragers.

This relationship gave them the opportunity to pass on their values to us, uninterrupted by politically correct curriculum, and this in turn gave them the peace of mind to let Crystal and Noah go to public high school. I chose not to, and squashed my last two years of high school into one, while working as a nanny for a family with two young girls.

So I found Ma and Pa Boot Camp had prepared me for anything college could dish out - except the disparaging remarks from teachers who thought they knew about home schoolers. Now, I think I've heard about every major problem home schooling is supposed to cause (social hang-ups, tardiness, incapacity for team sports, nerdiness), but not knowing how to outline a report was a new one to me. As much as one teacher complained about home schoolers, she obviously did not know she had three of them in her class - and none of us had problems outlining. She read my work aloud as exemplary, and, overall, my only failure was not being chosen to sing in the school choir.

Learn more about this author, Joilene Rasmussen.
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