Homeschool

I think a common misconception in homeschooling is that you have to do everything they do in a public school. That's the way I felt when I started 20-something years ago. I've homeschooled on and off, so my kids have been in school and been out of school. We've done it both ways. But I found that the most successful way to start a year of homeschool with a kid is to sit down with a paper and pencil and make a short list of what does this kid need to learn this year. And then we would start filling it out with resources and methods and timing and schedules and keep it simple. I always was more successful when I kept it simple.

I think one of the common misconceptions in homeschooling is that a child that is homeschooled is often socially awkward and unsocialized and incapable of really adjusting to normal, regular life outside of homeschooling.

After our daughter was homeschooled for three years and she was joining middle school and we had a teacher that we were going to back to school night and hearing how she's doing and the teacher said, wow, she was homeschooled. That's just so surprising because she was well adjusted and social and normal. My daughter kept saying, what did he mean by that? What did he mean by surprising? What was surprising?

One of the common misconceptions about homeschooling is that if you are not a certified teacher, you are not qualified to teach your children. And that's simply not true. Most homeschool families do not have a certified teaching parent. And I remember hearing at a summer education workshop that I attended, the instructor said, it isn't certification that makes a good teacher, it's understanding the learner. Well, I believe that's true. There is no one who understands your children better than you do. So you are definitely qualified to teach your children. So keep that in mind whenever anybody questions your abilities because you are or are not certified.

So as I mentioned in a previous video, I did homeschool with my family like 25 years ago, back when like no one was doing homeschool. Now like everyone's doing it. Especially since COVID, it seems like it's become even more popular cause people were forced to do it and then people have continued doing it. So anyways, what was interesting though is that my mom was actually getting contacted by people asking about homeschool. And so there was a family that lived nearby that actually started doing homeschool because my mom told them the correct information on it and it won't affect you in a bad way and won't cause you to be closely awkward. So there were people that started doing it because they knew our family.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions with homeschooling is that you really don't do homeschooling. I've known plenty of families that say they are homeschooling and some days they just don't do anything or they're on their own computers all day and it's just kind of like a free-for-all, do what you want when you want kind of very relaxed atmosphere. But I've seen it done so well so many times with a lot of structure and I really think organization is the key. So although I think some people do believe homeschooling is kind of set in quotes like you're homeschooling your kids when you're really just kind of keeping them home and maybe putting in front of them a YouTube video every once in a while, it can be done beautifully and kids can soar academically if done the right way with good resources, wise management, and good organization skills.

So I'm single, don't have kids, but my family did homeschool. A long time ago, I'm like in the 40s, 40 range, and this was like 25 years ago that we did homeschool, so like hardly anyone was doing it back then. So anyways, we'd always hear that homeschool was a bad thing because we weren't out in the public school making friends, doing the normal stuff that kids do, so we were going to have like social issues and be socially awkward and stuff like that, and we wouldn't be able to do well after, you know, we left home. But all of us have ended up going to college. My oldest sister did not graduate because of getting married and having kids, but the rest of us have graduated, and...