The Inappropriate Homeschooler's Top Tips for a Better (More Inappropriate) Homeschooling Experience

 

1. Let go of trying to control everything. 

As parents, we already feel the urge, the need, to control our children's lives.  We want to keep them safe.  We want to keep them healthy.  We want to make sure they have a *great* childhood, a solid foundation, and that they grow up to have a wonderful life!  That urge, that need, can become more than an urge or need though, especially in a homeschooling parent.  We really feel 100% of the responsibility of raising and educating our children because we are.  There is no brightly lit building where we send our children to for 7 hours a day to 'receive' their education.  The decision to homeschool often includes sacrifice.  The sacrifice may be a financial one, an emotional one, or both. It is human nature that when we sacrifice we do so with the hopes that there will be a great return on our investment.  Nothing is more important to a parent than their child/ren.  Despite the fact that we are with our children 24/7, give or take, because we homeschool, does not mean that we can, or should, control everything.  We sweat over every choice we make from the method we are using to school them to the materials we are using to school them.  We worry over their academic and social environment.  We feel completely, totally, utterly responsible for these human beings we are raising, guiding, teaching.  But as adults we have probably already learned in our own lives, in our own daily walk, that the only thing that we can truly control in life is our own attitude and reactions. We have learned, or are in the process of learning that once we accept that, we can be comfortable right where we are, at peace and happy.  The same is true in homeschooling.

Secular Homeschoolers Uniting!

 The National Alliance of Secular Homeschoolers

The first three years of our homeschooling journey were spent with me vacillating between feeling uncomfortable and antagonistic.  I tried to fit in for Punky’s sake.  I wanted her to have friends and activities and the only available avenue was to join the Christian groups where I was uncomfortable.  The longer I tried the more antagonistic I became.  Remember, I am the inappropriate homeschooler so it wasn’t just my personal beliefs that I was trying to squelch, but who *I* was, as a human being.  The situation reached critical mass in the Spring of  2012 after being asked to step down as a teacher at the local co-op because I had been ‘exposed’ as teaching my daughter it was okay that people were gay and having adjusted the wording to the statement of faith I had been required to sign.  With this final ‘nail’ in the coffin, we were now out of options for both a social and educational homeschooling community.

Why Should I Have to Pretend?

Secular Homeschooling in the Secular Community

There has been a bit of a hullabaloo in my neck of the woods the last week or so.  In the midst of the hullabaloo was the issue of being secular.  Sadly, the issue was inside a homeschool group that carries 'secular' in its title.  One would think that a secular group, that displays the word in its title, would have a clearly defined working use of the word secular.  However, no matter how well defined, it is apparent that the word means something different to each secular homeschooler and unless the word is defined to the ninth degree, there is room for interpretation.  Who knows, maybe even when it is defined to the ninth degree there would be room for interpretation.