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Rhiannon said, "What if Kirby hates school as much as I did? What are the odds?"
That's the moment I started considering homeschooling. I knew two unschooling families (in that same group) and two school-at-home families (ditto). I thought about it for the next year.
Flash forward 20 years. Her kids DID go to school, and they did not like it. Kirby never went to school.
The odds of which she spoke were well known to me. I taught Jr. High for six years, after paying close attention to what school was for various people, because I knew from the time I was six that I wanted to be a teacher, and I started teaching when I was twenty-one years old.
The odds that someone will love school are smaller and smaller as the years go by, and one element of loving school seems to be an unhappy homelife. i wasn't planning on providing my kids an unhappy homelife. Attachment parenting, in combination with my working on recovery from growing up with an alcoholic mom, was changing my life.
I could tell good and fun school stories at length, but in each story, there are people who "lost" because someone else won, or kids who were watching but not involved in whatever cool thing was happening.
The kids who have fun at school aren't ecstatic about school.
The kids who are unhappy at school are sometimes so unhappy they kill themselves or others. School wounds people for life, if they live.
I found the writing above today, in a folder of things I had saved for a book. But it isn't in the book. It's likely I didn't find it when I was working on The Big Book, but I'm glad I found it today.
It was probably written on a forum that no longer exists. I cleaned up some spelling and word order.
The photos are from that time, when I only had two children and figured they would be in school someday.
