There was no way my family was ever going to become a “homeschooling family.” I had attended St. Mary’s in Simsbury since kindergarten and was in the 5th grade. I loved my school, my friends and my teachers. After St. Mary’s the plan was for me to attend Catholic high school or prep school. Homeschool was just never an option, and my parents thought of it the way much of the country does—without structure, without qualifications and without academic assessments.
But then the pandemic hit in 2020, and I found myself learning at home, and all of a sudden school was something more dynamic and interesting than any school experience I had before. I studied math through Calculus I, the sciences of Geology, Meteorology, Oceanography, Astronomy, Biology, and Chemistry; Ancient, Medieval, British and American History and Literature; Geography, Civics, French, and Health.
Some of my courses were designed by my parents, and others I took online through the John Birch Society’s Freedom Project Academy. I also took some at St. Mary’s in Westfield, Massachusetts, like Studio Art, Theology, Latin, and Western Civilization, earning myself the Dido Award for keeping the class (slightly) off topic with my endless questions about Aeneas while reading The Aeneid by Virgil. All my homeschool studies have reinforced my belief that homeschooling is the best, most interesting way of learning because it can be tailor-made to the student. This year I’m applying to university to study the science of nutrition.
First, there’s getting to sleep until 8 a.m., and waking up feeling rested, and starting my lessons around 9 a.m. At my annual physical in 2022 (yes, I do go to the doctor!) we actually learned that studies favor later school start times for teens, because the extra sleep helps with a positive mood and less sleepiness during the day. I suppose homeschoolers always knew this. Some days I work until 5 or 6 p.m., when I am not attending a tennis practice.
Then there’s the option of learning using a variety of learning styles—visual, auditory, verbal (explaining), reading, writing, hands on activities, experiments, as well as solitary and social—and figuring out which ones worked best for me so I could understand the concept and “master the material.”
There was reading Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne and learning the card game Whist, reading “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and learning about my own Granny’s quilting, reading The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne and enjoying the spin-off movie “Easy A” with Emma Stone (better than the book), and loving Pride and Prejudice and becoming a Jane Austen fan. There was the time I drew an Illuminated Manuscript while studying Medieval Literature. Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four and learning the term Orwellian so that now I get all the references to Big Brother. I never laughed so hard as when my mom told me 1984 was a love story because Winston comes to love Big Brother! And my favorite was Drama, with one of the highlights being watching the Suffield Players perform And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and reading Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.
For my family there was less pressure with homeschooling, because there wasn’t the constant comparison to others and constant focus on grades. I’m not saying homeschooling is easy, because there were parts of it that were hard. I did have quizzes (vocabulary every Friday) and literature and history comprehension questions and essays, science experiments and lab reports, and tests and exams. And doing four math lessons a week with up to thirty equations to solve in each lesson was definitely not easy. But it was worth it. For all my subjects I had the time to work at my own pace and develop at my own speed because we were free to control our own schedule.
My family fell into homeschooling accidentally—but we didn’t stay by accident, because homeschooling turned out to be the most creative, relaxing, and rewarding learning environment that I experienced.