Chris's Excellent Adventure

I was a public school student from kindergarten up through 10th grade. I was well-behaved, got good grades, always did my work, never late to class. By the time I was halfway through 10th grade, I was really starting to get depressed. It was a serious effort just to get up in the morning. My angst had been building up for a while, and it was finally getting to me. The whole environment was wrong: many teachers who just didn't care, an inability to follow my own interests, an emphasis on grades and test scores at the expense of learning. And whenever I actually got interested in something, I could expect little help from the school and ridicule from classmates. I had gone so far as to make my writing worse so the teacher wouldn't read it to the class.

Sometimes I wish I had been stronger. I wouldn't have done those stupid assignments, I would have ignored the boring, useless lectures, and I would have written exactly what I wanted. Of course, I would also have gotten some pretty horrible grades. Not too helpful in terms of college admissions. As it was, the teachers said do it, I did it, and I buried my frustration. Many people know about the intelligent high school dropouts. But what about those students who aren't strong enough to rebel? Forcing myself to spend six hours a day in this place which was the last place I wanted to be, had serious consequences in terms of my emotional well-being.

So in tenth grade I noticed a review of The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn (see also her Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School) in the Millenium Whole Earth Catalog. That was the first time I even realized homeschooling was an option! I talked about this with my parents, who luckily were very supportive. If they were opposed to the idea, I would have gotten nowhere. We talked to my school guidance counselor and discovered that independent study was an option at my school. I was ready to just leave school altogether, but I decided to give independent study a try.

So for the second half of 10th grade, I left school two periods early. I met once a week with an English teacher from the district, and once a week with a retired social studies teacher. I faced a surprising amount of opposition from the school in doing this; my former teachers seemed to take it personally. This independent study got me through the rest of 10th grade, and I began to get a feel for independent learning.

The summer after 10th grade I got a job at the Math Forum (formerly the Geometry Forum) doing World Wide Web-related computer programming. It was a very cool summer job, and because of my decision to homeschool I was able to continue it into the "school" year. The people at the Forum are great, and I have learned a tremendous amount through my work there.

For 11th grade, my parents and I worked out a list of everything I wanted to study. I decided to continue with the two teachers I had been working with in my independent study, so English and social studies were covered. For the other subjects I knew I wanted to learn on my own. I would have been a nightmare to treat my parents as teachers and to attempt to recreate school in my house. What I'm doing is really not homeschooling. It's more like "unschooling".

The curriculum we set up got tossed pretty quickly. I realized that I learned much better concentrating on just a few subjects at at once. I much preferred a couple hours of one subject and then a few hours of another, instead of 30 minutes of six or seven different subjects. So I cut down the number of things I was studying. I decided to take the Computer Science AB AP exam in May, as well as the SAT II physics exam in June. So the way things worked out, I concentrated on English, social studies, work at the Forum, physics, and computer science. In addition to these, I'm taking upright and electric bass lessons and singing in my former school's singing groups.

Now that I've got all that out of the way, the most important things I've learned since leaving school haven't been intellectual in nature. I've learned a lot about all aspects of myself. My self-confidence is much improved. I am much more focused than I was in high school; I have a much better idea of what I want to do with my life. My self-discipline, while nowhere near where I'd like it to be, is much better (I didn't need self-discipline in school--teachers did that for me). Perhaps most importantly, I'm starting to feel emotions I had suppressed during many years of school. What an incredible thing it is to feel! Happy or sad, I don't care. I have also become interested in Buddhism, which relates to all these issues and more. I am a much fuller person now. These are the things I least expected to learn, yet they are the most important by far.

Homeschooling has allowed me to begin to find out who I am and become that person. Yes, I have a long way to go, but I know where I'm going!


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