Homeschooling, and gifted children. It’s been on my mind a lot recently because of the wee bit of attention R has been getting by officially graduating.
It’s a case of the chicken or the egg. Many people assume that R graduated from highschool at age 14 because he was homeschooled. I imagine they think he and I sat hunched over textbooks from morning to night, feverishly cramming information into his head so that he could gain a couple of years on his age peers. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He was homeschooled because he was gifted, because his talent for learning made it very difficult for him to find a school environment that suited his needs. He didn’t become a gifted student because he was homeschooled.
Paradoxically, taking him out of school allowed him to stay connected with his age peers. Staying in school meant either accomodating his intellectual needs by radically accelerating him, or accomodating his social needs by keeping him in an age-appropriate class. Neither option seemed reasonable because both split him in two. In both situations, he would ultimately have ended up feeling “alone in a crowd”, forced to hide parts of who he was in order to fit in. Homeschooling relieved him of this burden. By learning at home, he was able to work at his own pace without concern for what anyone else his age was doing. Then, after school hours, he played sports and hung out with friends, and enjoyed those activities without having them connected to school. In a way, he hid his differences, which made it easier for him to be accepted socially. By separating his learning from his socializing, he didn’t have to have his learning needs advertised. There was no drama about it, he didn’t have to be labeled, and no special accomodations needed to be made. This worked really well for him, and for our family.
When we finally took him out of school to homeschool him, I remember feeling such relief. No more walking on eggshells around the sensitive egos of particular teachers and administrators. No more negotiations, no more testing, no more individualized educational plans, no more hoping that we’d gotten through. It was all such an enormous effort, it was all ultimately futile, and it was all so much easier when we stepped outside of the box.
It has been lovely not to have to worry about any of that with the other kids. I don’t have to be concerned about them being adequately challenged or whether they are or are not “on grade level” in any particular subject. I don’t have to think about ages or subjects at all. They learn all the time, they learn what they’re interested in, and that’s good enough for me.
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