Lifestyle

Why I Homeschool

This year marks the beginning of our third year homeschooling and looking back, it seems inevitable that I ended up choosing this for my children.

However, until 3-4 years ago, I fully looked forward to (and expected to) walk my children to our local elementary school, then have them walk or bike to our local middle school, and then walk to our local high school (which is less than a five minute walk away).

I was a little worried about how I would manage the drop-off/pick-up for so many children (even then, I had visions of four kids), not to mention all their extra-curricular activities, but ultimately, I figured that millions of families do it every year. Surely, I would make it work.

But as the years progressed, I got more and more into my kids learning Chinese and wanting them to surpass my own abilities. That, of course, would take up at least a Friday night or a Saturday morning in Chinese school.

Plus, as I learned more about all the untold stories of America, both in terms of rendering peoples invisible as well as the mythologizing of America, I was already anticipating even more supplementing.

And then, of course, because I’m Taiwanese as well as secretly Tiger Mommyish, I firmly believed in my children taking as many extracurricular activities as possible because that is when their brains are most pliable.

So while none of any one of these things were that problematic on their own, the combination of them all was causing me a lot of stress.

And then I heard from my friend, Hotelier, that she was going to be homeschooling – and doing it in Chinese and BOOM!

A whole world opened up.

I stalked a bunch of homeschool Yahoo! groups and read a bunch of books for at least a year before I ultimately decided to homeschool and withdrew Cookie Monster from our local elementary school.

Of course, I didn’t really have these reasons crystallized in my mind when I pulled Cookie Monster out of school, but over the years, I have thought about it some more and distilled my reasons to the following:

1) I have two mutually exclusive beliefs:

a) Children are over-scheduled.

b) Children should learn as many things as possible.

I have these visions of what a childhood should look like. We all do (though they be different). For me, I see childhood as huge swaths of empty space. Plenty of time to play, read, laze about, watch TV, and daydream.

The idea of a childhood full of being shuttled from school to after school programs to home to homework to sleep to wake only to do it all again – that makes me feel claustrophobic.

How stifling.

And yet.

How else can I prepare my kids for the pending zombie apocalypse? (Or more realistically, their future?)

How else can they be well-rounded humans unless they take music lessons? Play sports? Learn coding? Survive the wilderness? Carve their own Davids? Perform calculus in their heads faster than a computer?

How else can they do these things unless they take classes? And if they are in “regular” school, how can we do these classes unless they are after school? And if every moment is filled with classes, when will we be a family? When will they be children? When will they live?

I have four children. Let’s just assume my kids each take two classes. That’s eight classes a week. Since there is an age spread of seven years between the oldest and the youngest, they cannot all be shoved into the same classes – assuming they even have the same interests.

I WOULD ONLY SEE MY CHILDREN IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR OF MY MINIVAN.

This was not acceptable to me.

2) Chinese language retention.

Everyone knows that once kids who were previously fluent in Chinese (or any language, really) starts full time school, their Chinese immediately takes a nose-dive and their English improves by leaps and bounds.

Of course it does.

It’s not some giant conspiracy (although it often seems to be). It’s just math.

There are only so many waking hours in a day. And if the majority of those hours are in English dominant spaces, how could our children not eventually become English dominant?

From what I recall as a child, though I didn’t exactly resent speaking and understanding Chinese, I certainly did not enjoy giving up every Saturday morning to weekly Chinese schools for my entire pre-college education.

Who is to say my children would be equally un-resentful?

Plus, having been a product of those weekly Saturday schools and finding them to be unequal to the task of what I personally would like for my own children, I knew it would require even more effort on my part (and thereby, my children). That would require even more of the already limited free time my kids would theoretically have.

3) I fundamentally disagree with how and what schools teach – particularly in areas of history and social studies.

This is the one that took the longest for me to eventually realize.

I mean, where to start?

Personally, I find that school teaches our kids information (and not always good information) but don’t actually teach our kids how to learn. Like, how to best read a textbook in order to retain information. Or how to take good notes. Or how to study.

And all those tests! What is the point of tests, really? I mean, even as a hyper-competitive person, I recognize the futility of tests.

When in life are you, as an adult, in a situation where you absolutely have to have everything memorized without access to a calculator or Google or a reference book? I mean, you obviously are required to be competent. But ultimately, if you don’t know something or cannot recall some random fact, you can find out.

Also, just like I have a huge problem with Sunday School, I have a huge problem with regular school.

It turns out, the older I am, the more anti-establishment I have become. (Not entirely, I do enjoy my creature comforts.)

But I was particularly disillusioned with how our children are inculcated with the Myth of America (from when they are very small and first learn of the pilgrims and Squanto and the first Thanksgiving) and how even in college, they may never be shaken out of their myths or confronted with the horrible realization that everything they learned about in school was a lie.

Isn’t that how we ended up with Trump?

Isn’t that how we have people who deny the Holocaust?

I distinctly recall a moment in 7th grade World History class. In a textbook of several THOUSAND pages, there were exactly two pages on the histories of China, Japan, Africa, and South America.

China, in all its 5,000 years of history was reduced to a few paragraphs.

China, a country that invented paper, gunpowder, and the compass, among other things, was explained in half a page. Of World History.

I was enraged. (Mostly because I was Chinese and wanted to learn more about my people.)

Clearly, World History meant the only world that the publishers thought mattered: the Western European World.

Fuck these people.

I realized that a lot of this “corrected” or expanded view of history is what we go to college for – but why? Why waste so much time teaching our children such a fictionalization of our world only to perhaps knock it down in college when they’re older?

Oh, right. Because white supremacy and patriarchy.

Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to support white supremacy and patriarchy.

My kids are going to be woke, y’all. They’re going to be woke as fuck.

There are other reasons why I am pleased to be homeschooling despite the obvious disadvantage of having to be with my children for so much of the day, but these are the main driving forces.

I’m sure if you ask even one hundred other homeschooling families, you will get an additional one hundred reasons.

But you will find, that like all things, these families all end up looking like what works for the main homeschooling parent and their children. It is the ultimate in a customized education – for better or for worse.

Thanks for reading, friends. I would love to hear why you do or do not homeschool in the comments.

 

Author

Virginia Duan is the entertainment editor for "Mochi Magazine," a freelance writer, and an Asian American author who writes stories full of rage and grief with biting humor and glimpses of grace. She spends most of her days plotting her next book or article, shuttling her children about, participating in more group chats than humanly possible, and daydreaming about BTS a totally normal amount.

2 Comments

  1. Do not. Can not. No patience. Might kill children by accident. Though I do need more time. But I also want the money. Greedy person I am.

    • Wanting money does not make you greedy. Without money, how can you provide food, shelter, and Chinese books? Lol.