BUILDING AN EDUCATION

Apparently everyone is going to be homeschooling now, whether they want to or not. And since I’ve been homeschooling since Amazon was the name of a river and a googol was the digit one with a hundred zeros after it, I’ve thought about homeschooling a lot.
And it’s the same thing every time, the second or third thing that people ask about when they find out that I’m homeschooling. They always ask how I do it — how I teach so many subjects, and how I’ll be able to teach chemistry, calculus, French — anything that’s hard.

It’s just such a strange thing to ask that it always throws me — why on earth would I teach chemistry? I can’t even understand why they’re asking, and it takes me a minute to realize what the question means, and I know right away that they know nothing about homeschooling and that we have to start the conversation on a very basic level.

Oh, and for the record, the first and second things people ask? How my kids are going to make any friends, and how I can do it, when they couldn’t possibly. Those are entirely different questions, to be answered another day. What I’m addressing now is how, not why. And why it’s a whole lot simpler, and more complex, than most people seem to think.

I have an extended analogy, if you’ll forgive me for it and follow along. I think it’s a good one, and it’s the way I frame homeschooling…