Homeschooling Just Isn't Normal.

"Mom, sometimes I just wonder if I am not a normal kid."
"You're not a normal kid."

We've hit that point. 13! We've homeschooled since 1st grade and she has finally found us out. We're weird...really weird! Of course, when we made the decision in the first place, weirdness was a big factor to consider. There were past impressions we had to overcome to be convinced that homeschooling wasn't a direct path to social exclusion. We had to be certain our girls wouldn't be like THOSE homeschoolers.

(Um, yeah. That's our family.)

Like, there was the extremely awkward, introverted girl who didn't fit in with the other high school girls in the church group I led 20 years ago. She was educated by computerized curriculum and lived in the sheltered environment of a home completely absent of any male presence - with her grandmother, single mother and enthusiastically happy sister. She gravitated to me, the adult, and told me she could care less about the kids who didn't already believe in Jesus. I guess when one of my small group girls told us that she had had an abortion, I could see the distance between their social orbits. She did go off to college - a small, Christian one - and I'm hoping the world opened her eyes and her heart.

Thankfully, when we hit speed bumps in the public school system and saw our daughters sinking into failure, it just happened that some "normal" homeschoolers came across our path - like in a musical, dancing and singing a song that related exactly to what we were thinking about at that moment. After a few years, we've come to learn that these individuals were only marginally normal, much like ourselves, which brings me to the point of this whole rant: We didn't choose to homeschool so that our kids would turn out like everyone else.

It isn't that "everyone else" isn't wonderful, amazing and successful. It's that we saw unique opportunities to do stuff with our kids that the school wasn't going to do. We took the alternate route and hoped that it was the best one for our girls.

This year, we doubted our decision. We had our eldest take the standardized tests and admissions exam and another admissions exam and turn in a report card (which I made up based on my subjective opinion of her ability as her primary teacher. When you sit there with your kids and read everything they do, you know if they've got it or not.) Anyway... Lo and behold! She got into the very selective high school ranked #5 in Illinois and #156 in the US by U.S. News. Are we happy now?!

And what you really want to know is, is she "normal"?

Frankly, NO! She's a fish out of water (Oddly, she is a freshman swimmer on their Varsity championship swim team, but I digress.) As a former educator observing my homeschooled child navigate the school experience, I have grown cringingly aware of a crippling defect in American education (And no, of course it's not my child. She's perfection, okay?):

Public education doesn't teach young people HOW to think. It teaches them WHAT to think. That is not education, it is indoctrination, and is a topic for a different blog post. (Please comment if you'd like me to post about it.) Thankfully, there are some exceptions, teachers who strive to educate and foster the love of learning, but they are sprinkled in between assessments, perfunctory homework assignments, and worksheets that reiterate the textbooks. Content is the goal, not thinking. The educational standards delineate this content: "Such and such content in 5th grade, such and such for 8th grade, etc." The kids who thrive, think, and achieve beyond the institutional standards have outside influences working in their favor, and often have families who invest in their character development and passion for learning.

But off the soapbox and back to weirdness. She's totally odd. She's been asked if she is a vegetarian, a Lutheran, and a lesbian all in the same week. She kindly answered that she's straight, loves meat, is not a Lutheran and just likes wearing long skirts and a pixie cut. They can't put her in a social "box" because homeschoolers don't usually brand themselves the way mainstream kids do. This child voluntarily closed her Snapchat account because it was annoying.

Are they socially awkward? Maybe. They shake hands with adults, look you in the eye, put their phones away during dinner (most of the time), play with babies, talk politics, listen to music from previous decades and make jokes about literature. I guess that's kind of awkward these days.

One of the girls is a social butterfly obsessed with 80s music, a blooming artist, a pre-professional ballerina, AND she's a natural at math and reading people. My other one prefers books to humans, can sing like a Broadway vocalist, writes like a college English professor and would live in an aquarium if given the choice, especially if the meal plan was all fish-based. Our family loves each other and to spend time together, learn together, goof off together, and travel together. As parents, we've been re-educated, by our kids and with our kids.

So, I guess we aren't normal, and I wouldn't have it any other way.