My oldest daughter had an assignment to write a composition on a topic of her choice. The topic she chose was ‘My journey as a homeschooler’ which I have posted so that others can get a feel of homeschooling from a homeschooler’s perspective:
When my parents decided to homeschool us five years ago, my siblings and I were somewhere close to devastated. The thought of not going to school was incomprehensible. It took two years for us to start studying at home diligently. Since then it’s been only an uphill climb to becoming more independent, confident and successful. Today we believe that homeschooling is the best thing that happened to us.
The beginning of this journey was not easy. We had to learn how to study by ourselves because we had no one to push us. We had to get used to not wearing a uniform and getting into “school mode.” Studying in our pajamas was definitely odd! It took time to pay attention to what we were reading without sitting in a classroom full of students. As a result, we lost out on 6 months.
As time went on, we learnt to do all those things with ease. Most of all, we learnt to self-motivate ourselves. We became self-learners, although we had the occasional slip where we would not be able to concentrate at all and would spend the whole day “pretending to study.” We learnt to study only from books and the internet and taught ourselves how to take quizzes and tests. Our mother would spend almost the entire night downloading material from the internet and printing it out so we could study in the morning. It wasn’t very easy to concentrate on all that work when we were still in our pajamas.
Getting used to homeschooling was not the only problem our family faced. The decision we took to educate ourselves at home brought about a lot of mixed reactions from the outside world, including family and friends. When asked which school we go to, we would tell them that we homeschool to which they would respond by either laughing or seeming extremely baffled. My family has faced a lot of criticism for the decision we made. People have accused us of being “uneducated” and “uncivilized.” They have claimed that we are and will grow up to be anti-social because of this decision. It was hard in the beginning but then we got used to it. As we made progress, we realized that we could prove the outside world wrong.
