My Home School Story

One of the most striking things about my childhood is that I skipped almost the entire K-12. I was in public schools for 6th and 7th grade, and a somewhat ghetto private Christian school for 9th grade, and that’s it! For quite a few of those years, my parents made an effort to give me and my brother and sisters a structured equivalent to the public school curriculum, with more-or-less fixed “periods” between somewhat-fixed start and end times. On rare occasions, we even used textbooks. The last three years of high school, I was mostly on my own, and to be honest I wasted most of that time playing online games, but I was attending community college all that time, so it’s not like I was hurting for education or anything. In fact, I came out quite alright scholastically. The whole experience provides me a somewhat unique outsiders perspective on the whole American education system.

My homeschooling began when I was five or six years old. We were renting a house in Pasadena, California, while my father attended seminary at Fuller University. The first year was a somewhat tedious, monotonous time while Mom drilled my sister and I with phonics. We learned to read pretty quickly, and started writing, slowly and carefully writing out letters in the same alphabet Roman Senators used over two millennia ago. In the early years, we had “classes” similar to what would be encountered in the typical classroom: besides reading and writing, we struggled with arithmetic, we read and listened to stories from history, we studied basic science, we even did social studies, though I doubt they resembled “real” social studies very closely since my parents were very conservative fundamentalist Christians. And, of course, there was one class you won’t find your old 5th grade teacher teaching any time soon; Bible Study. Yes, that’s one book my siblings and I are very familiar with, having studied it (under a Biblical studies grad student, no less!) throughout all our childhood.

It was a bit weird growing up under these circumstances. All our friends went off to school early in the morning and didn’t come home until the afternoon. About the time I was in fifth grade, my sister and I would even watch the other kids trudging off, envying them from behind our window. It’s not that homeschool was bad– in retrospect it was a lot more pleasant than the alternative. But the grass on our side of the hill was starting to seem like it could use some greening up.

Eventually, my parents were too busy putting food on the table, and they had to break down and turn to public schooling. I started sixth grade at Wangenheim Middle School. I was thrilled. I’d gone five grades secluded, five years where my pool of potential friends consisted of the half dozen kids living in the same neighborhood, half a decade in which half my waking life I lived in a naive, sheltered little world, an overgrown bird testing the limits of the nest. Suddenly I was surrounded by kids my age, so many kids I couldn’t count them, and I was in heaven for about a year. While my classmates were jaded by half a lifetime of stultifying pedagogy, I was like a twelve-year-old preschooler.

I was terrified of arithmetic. For a couple years, my father had tried with very little success to get long division through my thick skull. Forget long division, I couldn’t even get the multiplication algorithm straight. I hadn’t even memorized the multiplication table. I was frightened out of my skull Ms. Black would make me come up to the board and multiply a couple five-digit numbers in front of the class. I’d botch it up something fierce and the other kids would laugh me back into mother’s arms. Turns out (as is so often the case in life), there was no reason to worry. Math class was one wishy-washy hour of basic shapes and grocery store arithmetic. “This is a triangle… this is a square… this is your change if you give the cashier a dollar…” I couldn’t believe it, but I wasn’t complaining!

Halfway through the schoolyear, they moved me from the basic 6th grade class I was in, into some kind of honors class. It was basically the same exact thing, except different faces and instead of a teacher who absolutely loved me for being so adorable, I got a teacher who absolutely hated me. Oh, and the math finally got harder. So, I became the class clown. The thrill of a new environment had given me enough momentum to really care and strive to do my best in school, and that initial enthusiasm had about burned out by now. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved school because I loved being with other kids. I was a people person at heart, even if five years of home tutelage had made me hopelessly awkward. But now that levity was transformed from good student levity into class clown levity. I’m not sure how I even passed sixth grade, but there you go. I was eventually expelled from Wangenheim mid-seventh grade and transferred to nearby Challenger Middle School, where all my new teachers were warned that I was a dangerous computer hacker, but that’s a whole other story

I didn’t like Challenger very much, so my parents enrolled me in a very cheap private Christian high school, where they were willing to turn a blind eye to the fact I was completely skipping past eighth grade. By this time, I’d discovered my love for abstract math, and I’d started teaching myself calculus, so high school was kind of a joke. Or rather, a cruel prank played by God. That is to say, the initial enthusiasm I’d had for public education had turned a complete 180 and I was the most radically anti-highschool person in the place. In establishments like this, there are two types of people: the goody two-shoes who happily drink their parents’ Kool-Aid, and the screw-ups who had gotten kicked out of every other place and this was their last chance. Naturally, I made close friends with the latter crowd, and that was probably the most actual education I’d receive in all three years of official enrollment. Well, that or the time the substitute English teacher communed with God and prayed for him to release the evil spirits from my soul

Near the end of ninth grade, the administrators found a sketch paper where I’d drawn some rebellious pictures, and they made it clear to my parents I wouldn’t be welcome next year. Sitting in the principal’s office, I half-heartedly plied some reverse psychology to try to stay in school: “You’re right, sir, God could never reform a guy like me…” But they had no interest in reforming anyone who wasn’t already “Rapture Ready”, which was just as well because I was fed up anyway. The only thing I’d miss, going back to homeschool, was my classmates, who despite all else, I really loved hanging out with.

The next three years of “school”, my parents more or less let me be. My Mom made some attempts to give me library books to read, but I only read them if they were particularly interesting. Most the time, I played computer games. I became a total shut-in with barely a friend in the world. But it would be a huge mistake to say I wasn’t learning anything. I emerged from my lair to attend community college, taking advantage of a socialist California program where current high school students can get free tuition at two-year colleges. And besides that, I was teaching myself advanced math all the time.

One of the main things I can see from my unique vantage point, is just how little of the public education system is really necessary to become intellectually educated. I can’t fathom what they were teaching, for example, in the five years of math that I missed. All this said, however, I missed out on a huge social experience, and that’s effected me to the present day. The school experience is part of the common background of the overwhelming majority of U.S. society, so when my parents decided to homeschool me, whatever else their intentions, they succeeded in ensuring I’d never live anything like a “normal” life. Whether that’s a good thing or bad isn’t clear: maybe it’s neither; it just is. Would I change things if I could do it over again? Well, speaking as a solipsist, I must have created this reality for myself for a reason, a very good reason which I probably won’t comprehend til death wakes me up from the dream of life…

FURTHER READING

My Time at the University of Arizona
My Time in USAF Bootcamp
My Experience As A Computer Programmer
My Anime Story
My Time as a Pickup Artist