Home School – Page 7 – Home's Cool!

I saw this graphic shared, and expected it to make me feel a bit worthless, because none of my children are prodigies or geniuses. I feel like there is this stereotype that all homeschool kids have to blow their public school counterparts out of the water, academically speaking.

Well, it turns out that homeschooled kids do very, very well. I wouldn’t expect less of my children, no matter where they receive their education (and that may change from year to year). Still, it’s encouraging to see that most homeschooled kids tend to do much better than the average bear.

Honestly, I didn’t choose homeschool for my children because of the academics. I didn’t choose to homeschool them to protect them from the peer pressure and perceived dangers of public school. I didn’t choose homeschool because my religion demands it (it doesn’t, by the way). I didn’t choose it so I…

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Guest Post, Home School, Inspiring

Check It Out!

Posted on August 18, 2013August 18, 2013 by Katharine

I’m rather excited, here . . .

A lovely home schooling mom has invited me to guest post at her place, A Homeschool Mom and will published my work, today.

The topic?

“The one thing I did not know, and wish someone had told me, about home schooling.”

I had fun with it and wish you all would run on over to Cristina’s, check it out, leave a nice comment, look around and leave another nice comment, too!

Thanks!

And thanks to Cristina, too!

Check mark photo credit: Wikipedia

Good ol' days, Home School, Inspiring, Who's the mom here?

How to Tell the In-Laws, part 2

Posted on August 8, 2013December 19, 2015 by Katharine

Yes, dear home educator, if your in-laws are very slow to accept your decisions, you may have a tough convincing task to attempt. You can ruin a relationship with extremely important people if you ignore the feelings of family members.

Never forget this:

No matter how right you are, you are the ones who are changing.
If there is a problem within the relationship, you are the ones through whom the problem is coming.
No matter how bizarre or painful your in-laws reactions may seem to you, you have the burden of proof.

This does not mean that you are wrong, no! If God is showing you to home school, then your decision is good and right. You can see that.

Your in-laws cannot, and maybe never will, unless someone who cares about them can help them see. This is where you may come in. They are the ones who feel bad, not you. Your patience toward them will help determine how this all turns out.

Knowing where to start can seem impossible, can it not? The best place to start any endeavor is on your knees.

Pray that God would give you the right words, springing from a right heart.
Remind yourself of the dedication your parents showed in your upbringing.
Recall that God provided for you, then, through them.
Remember His command to honor your parents.
Think how you would feel in a similar circumstance. It is not enough, in God’s eyes, to be right—you also must have a right heart attitude. (I Corinthians 13)

You must deal very gently and humbly with your in-laws. The way to do this is to enter the whole situation with thankfulness for your in-laws’ reaction. Three glorious things are happening in your life:

Your in-laws care about you and your children.
Your in-laws relate to you.
You are home schooling.

Be thankful that they care, thankful that they still relate to you, and thankful that you home school. God can give you that thankful heart and the gentle humility.

Then, keep the reality of the problem in sight. The hurt, fear, and embarrassment are real to your in-laws, and will not go away for a long time. Only gentle, humble dealings will assuage their hearts. Maybe they do not really want to hear that their hurt is needless, their fears are groundless, or their embarrassment is baseless. While we can acknowledge that such a reaction may point to selfishness, pride, and lack of trust on their part, it does not change the fact that you, the messenger of such good/bad news, are finding it ill-received. It does not change God’s command to us to honor them. Part of honoring parents is to take their discomfort seriously.

The hurt is the hardest.

They truly did the best they could do (perhaps) for you, their child, and it truly is not good enough for your children. There is no getting around that.

Nevertheless, what your parents did—shifting their responsibility to educate you onto a worldly institution—was considered the best possible thing in their day. Now days it is not. Now days, experts cite home education as the best.

So in a way, you are doing exactly what your parents did: giving the best that you can.

In your parents’ days, homebound education was for children who had rheumatic fever or some other physical difficulty. In their parents’ days, though, the best often included instruction from someone who did not have a degree and many more received their education at home.

Perhaps you can make them see that what was “best” in Great-Great-Grandma’s days is now returning to vogue.

Perhaps you can make them see your home schooling as trying to keep up with current trends.

That is what they did. Thank them for caring and for their input. Let them know that you will need a lot of input. If possible, recruit their help from the start. If they can only provide a different type of flower for botany study or a different place to picnic, they can feel less left out and more as if “we help home school our grandchildren”. Help them see how much the worldly schools have deteriorated into something that is not the same as when you were little. Remind them that the Bible and good, common, Biblical sense no longer operate in the world’s schools, making them hostile places for children.

Their fears are not imagined, either.

How can your children get jobs or go to college without a high school diploma?

It was not so very long ago when you asked the same question yourself, was it? It is a legitimate question, along with many other questions that accompany the decision to home school.

Do not fault your parents or in-laws for asking the same questions you were asking just a year ago. They care, too. They may remember a few bad grades that you accumulated during your educational quest and may even feel that you do not know as much as you think you do.

Of course, almost anyone can teach most little ones the ABC’s, degree or not. What they really are asking about is high school math, is it not?

In most states, there is no test to prove “teacher proficiency” among home school moms, thank God! We are free to fail, if we want.

The simple answer is that we care about the children in our school, do not want to fail to meet their needs, and do not want them to fail. We will be diligent and we will constantly be checking our progress and theirs. Having a solid plan for checking their progress will help smooth the road for you with them.

Their embarrassment stems from what their friends will think.

These feelings can come from the idea of the dropout or the handicapped; ideas that, right or wrong, still carry a stigma for many people. Not too long ago, anyone who did not finish school was questionable.

Of course, we know that home educated graduates are more likely than others to find employment, in many cases, but our parents do not know this, sometimes (and neither do their chums.)

If you can find one of the lovely brochures that explain the preeminence of home schooling, it might help, especially if you present it quietly and gently.

If you know of other home educators who have had wonderful results (there are many) you might help the situation by pointing to their success.

One of the best arguments that I have found, one that even convinces me when I question myself, is the very long list of former home educated who became successful, even famous people. Many authors, scientists, and statesmen had the blessed start that can only happen on Mother’s lap. Many productive, moral members of our society have obtained their backbones from walking with Dad to town or to the barns and fields and watching him deal with the people he encountered. There is nothing like the way our country began, for generating good, solid life.

If you can make your family see that, they might catch your vision.

I can not promise that it will be easy. It has not been easy for us. Probably it will take a long time. Realize that you are asking them to trust you, regardless of their feelings, and . . .

. . . trust is something that a person must earn.

You cannot require or force it in any way; you must earn it. It is possible to earn trust, though, and some have done it. Until you see the beginnings of trust in your in-laws, at least you can base your words and actions upon humility and wisdom, and not leave your family with just reasons for their opposition.

Your calm, loving re-assurances can go a long way toward helping them have peace about your decisions.

It can help you have peace about it, too.

How to Tell the In-Laws (katharinetrauger.wordpress.com)

Home School, Wisdom

How to Tell the In-Laws

Posted on August 7, 2013December 6, 2014 by Katharine

If you are like most home educators, you and your spouse have in-laws and most of the time it is fun to be around them.

Because of their age, experience, and wisdom, they know you could still learn something from them, if necessary, but good in-laws bite their tongues a lot. Mine do, and so do my husband’s.

Why? They realize that too much good advice will ruin something more important: their relationship with you. They prefer to allow you to make your mistakes and learn on your own. They have decided long ago to remain silent about your decisions if it does not seem too important.

Usually.

When you decide to home school, you put your in-laws in a tough place. They can no longer hold their peace if they truly balk at what you are doing.

Many people lack the vision for home schooling. Your in-laws may be among those many. Sometimes they fear their grandchildren will lose something they fought hard to obtain for you: free formal education. They cannot grasp the high level of corruption and inefficiency that you can plainly see has crept into the worldly system, tying the hands of even the most dedicated teachers.

And some of them are public educators, themselves—yikes!

With a lack of understanding comes the tendency to relate according to feelings.

What do they feel?

First, your in-laws may feel hurt.

Everything they did, likely, was to create a perfect environment for you.

Some of them had parents or grandparents who spoke broken English because they came here from elsewhere, to have better things for you.

It has always been a matter of family pride. Just as you now are pouring everything into your children’s well-being, so they, once, poured everything into your well being. They worked hard “to put shoes on your feet” so that you could have an education.

Perhaps they both worked outside the home to give you opportunities that you would not have had. They do not realize that perhaps this physical absence in your life made you unable to share with them when hard things were happening to you “out there”.

Perhaps they remember only the fun experiences in the worldly schools of their day. Perhaps they even are worldly, themselves, and cannot see what is the matter. To them, it appears that you are throwing away all they did for you and, in effect, saying it was not good, or not good enough.

Your in-laws also may feel fear.

Not too long ago, anyone with a high school diploma was a real success. Back then, anyone who accomplished a college degree was almost venerated.

Teachers, extremely educated educators, could not possibly be wrong, right? They almost unanimously say that their ways are the right ways, right? How could anyone in his right mind just throw away all that expertise? How could anyone stand in the face of such authority?

If your in-laws have noticed the reports of high school, and even college graduates, who barely can read and cipher, they feel that those must be exceptions that happen in “some other state”.

If they have read your child’s copy work with glaring grammatical errors copied from the worldly school chalkboard, they fear the child must have miscopied it.

They fear that no one could do a good job without an entire school district backing him.

They fear it is dangerous to entrust the education of children to people who, themselves, do not have education degrees.

Your in-laws may also feel embarrassed.

To the courageous, it can seem like a shameful thing to quit.

They would not lightly lay down the fight for an education. Even children who have difficult handicaps go to school, right?

We all should fight to make our entire nation well-educated, right?

They wonder what’s wrong, that their grandchildren cannot “get along” at school.

They wonder if your children have “mental problems” that you are trying to hide.

They wonder if it is a cult. The whole thing just seems too “otherworldly” to them.

How dumb can it be to pay taxes for education and then buy all those books!

______________________________

Solutions tomorrow!

Believe it or not!, Home School, Wisdom

Will Your Children Go to Jail?

Posted on August 6, 2013August 3, 2013 by Katharine

About a third of the U.S. Population is, or has been, incarcerated, or is on parole.

A third.

I listened while a prison missionary told that terrifying statistic. I watched with mouth agape, a film showing baptisms of people in handcuffs. The joy of new life in Christ was obvious on their faces.

The prisons make up the fastest-growing portion of the Church in our country, if you count conversions.

The missionary told us of inmates who had come to Christ, finished their sentences, and returned to become missionaries to prisons, themselves, leading hundreds to life in Christ.

At last, our speaker told us of one inmate, a serial killer who had finally come to life in Christ and had gone on to lead many fellow inmates to Christ. If I told you his name, you would gasp. He was one of the top-name killers in our country, not long ago.

I say “was” because he, himself, was murdered by an inmate, about 4 years ago. His story, though, has direct relevance to us.

While this man was in prison, his dad sent him some Creation science materials. Reading these papers and books led him to realize Jesus is Lord, and to give his life over to Him.

In a nationally televised interview, he said he always thought evolutionists were right, that there is no God. If we all come from slime and return to it, he reasoned, he saw no point in having laws, no way of defining right and wrong. If what we do does not matter to any higher authority, then it is of no consequence, and killing is not wrong.

Therefore, he killed.

This was correct reasoning, by the way.

The Existence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob IS the only reason to do right; His Word, the only definition of right.

You know, Hitler thought the same way.

So did Madame guillotine.

Everyone agrees.

Think about it awhile.

Keep your babies at home. Keep them out of the prisons built for children, the miniature unarmed police states that teach evolution.

Teach them the truth, yourself.

Never quit.

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What do they feel?