Friday, July 15, 2011

Homeschooling-How we started

Homeschooling is not for everybody, but it is the right fit for some. Since the video below came out, more people ask us how we started homeschooling. I can still remember back in 1998 when my wife mentioned homeschooling to me. My response was, "What is that?". The first thing I pictured was a bunch of people dressed in old clothes sharing tattered text books between each other. Seriously, I had never heard of the concept nor knew anyone that did it. Needless to say, we started exploring it.

I was skeptical, but it all began to turn around when we met a nice family from Texas. We were visiting their church and they were our host home for the week. We entered their kitchen and began to talk for about thirty minutes. At this point, I didn't even know they had children. Then a young boy came from around the corner and sat in the family room, then a young girl came in the room and sat down to read a book, then two more children came from around the corner and didn't say a peep.

Ok, I have to pause here and give you the backdrop of mine and Lisa's experience with parents and children to this point. We had just graduated from college, so we didn't know many married families with children. The parents we did see always looked stressed out, broke, busted, and disgusted. When we went out to public places we seemed to always run into "Bebe's Kids" (Watch this trailer if you never heard of them.) These are kids that flip you off in stores, smack their parents, and demand candy to the extent of tantrums in the check out lane. Most of our classmates that we graduated with were telling us how they were going to delay having children and how it was going to be hard once they took the plunge. One thing was common, most people only wanted one or at most two children, because it would be entirely too expensive to have more. It was repeated to us, that children could hinder our new careers that we were starting with our hard earned degrees. We were told we didn't spend four-six years in college just to have children. Yes, we had some intruding in-laws, out-laws, aunts, and grandmothers. It seems that when people reach a certain age they will just tell you anything that's on their mind. After we conceived our first child eight months into marriage we heard, "Tell Jonathan to slow down", "You're not going to have anymore are you?", "I mistakenly had children too young you should of waited!". People talked about raising children as if it they had been through eighteen years of a concentration camp. All of this, with a few experiences from our own upbringing, was our early view of children.

Well, back to my story. I saw all four of their children come from the back of the home and sit in the family room. I was amazed! I didn't hear any screaming, fighting, or crashing before they came out. I was doubly amazed to see one of them come out reading a book. I mentally left our conversation for a minute as I looked at the kids, then I interrupted the dad and asked him, "Did you just give those kids a whoopin' right before we came, what's wrong with them?" Everyone burst out in laughter (except my wife, she cringed).

From then on they began to explain about parenting, home education and the Bible. They were our first impressions of a home schooling family and what I saw was impressive. It really blew all my misconceptions about homeschooling out of the water. I will explain more in future post. As the video shows below, we ended up homeschooling and we still do to this day. This is a preview video to a cover story published by Home Educating Family. We are so grateful that our friends Gus and Shirley Solis introduced us to Scot and Becky Keliher who own the magazine. We are grateful to God how he orders our steps. Click here if video is not below:

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