One school year at a time

Like most of you, Lisa and I are PSKs (Public School Kids). For the most part, public schooling was a positive experience for us both. In fact, its positive influence inspired Lisa to seek a career as a middle school teacher. Wow. I don’t know about you, but it takes something really special to influence one to become a middle school teacher. (wink!) But that’s a subject for another day. Since then, she has changed her career to full-time motherhood/home operations manager/social coordinator/taxi driver. (Actually, her title goes on and on, but that too is a subject for another day.)

With all that said, our kids are experiencing something quite different. Although they’ve started in public schools, we’ve slowly transitioned them from public, to private to home schooling. And this year will be the final step.

It’s been a terrific journey for all of us. Each summer we evaluated how the previous school year went and planned for the next. Each wary step was made with prayer and careful consideration. We never looked beyond that. We simply took one school year at a time with only two simple stipulations:

• We would stick to our decision the whole year, and
• if we didn’t like the outcome, we could backup to what did work the next year.

That’s it.

We’ve had a lot of folks ask us why. Why would we enroll our kids in private school or home school while living in one of the strongest academic school districts in the Houston area? Admittedly, Lisa and I have wrestled with this for several years. (I don’t mean arm wrestling, leg wrestling or WWF, I mean the cerebral kind.) Some of the reasons why homeschooling seems right for us at this time are:

• We believe in the superior ideals and principles of the classical education model introduced to us by Grace Classical Academy (GCA) three years ago.
• We love the flexibility that home education brings, both in terms of customizing the curriculum for each child and scheduling agility around activities. (A flexible schedule is increasingly important for Justus, for example, since his competitive gymnastics program takes more and more of his time).
• We feel that much of the public school day is woefully inefficient.
• As for organized social activities, Justus and Rebecca remain fulfilled through gymnastics, theatre, baseball, dance and coop clubs. We don’t need the public school system for that.
• While we don’t intend to shelter our kids from the intense secularism that plagues our society and experienced in our schools, we intend to introduce it to them on our terms using a biblical world view.

Suffice it to say, we’ve studied and prayed hard.

And so the transition began with our first year at GCA. I’ve never thought about it before, but it’s seems that GCA was purposed to be catalyst for getting us to this point. Even though Lisa hadn’t taught professionally in over ten years, before our first year at GCA was out, she was assisting in the classroom. (She just couldn’t help herself.) By the second year, she was a fulltime 5th and 6th grade teacher teaching all subjects, and saying at the end, “I can do this!” Last year Rebecca was homeschooled full-time and Justus went part-time to GCA on an optional university model (Tuesdays and Thursdays he homeschooled).

Suffice it to say, school starts on Monday and we’re doing the full monty: homeschooling both kids full-time. I say “we,” but everyone knows that Lisa is doing all the work. I’ve helped a little with selecting the math curriculum and setting the daily schedule, but Lisa will be doing all the teaching. So, I guess Lisa can add “teacher” to her job title now. I’ll be flying in occasionally to provide math and science support. (I’m actually looking forward to that.) Our kids will attend coop on Fridays for cooperative learning with other students for humanities (history, literature and Bible). Rebecca will be taking physical science this year and will share science lab experiments with her friend, Anna. Rebecca and Justus will be challenged in math, Greek and Latin roots, grammar and dictation, creative writing, typing and critical thinking. Whew! It’s going to be a challenging year, but our entire family is looking forward to the riches the school year will bring!

-D

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