Home Schooling, My Story.

 This in in memory of my 1st wife who passed away when my youngest was in 11th grade. She was not a teacher by trade but her legacy lives on it her children.
I was reading Heroditus Huxley  where she was explaining why she is homeschooling her kids, it prompted me to write this blog and maybe encourage some who are doing it or considering it.  

All 4 of my kids (now grown) were home-schooled and graduated as such. My daughter is now married and has a small home business, My eldest son is a doctor, My next son has his degree and is now starting law school and my youngest went to trade school and has a good paying job as a diesel mechanic for a dredge company and gets to travel.
It is not as hard as you might think and we found there is tons of information out there to help and contrary to popular belief most states do not set any real standards. You can get curriculum form MANY places and there is always online lessons as well.
After registering as home-schoolers we never had any problems or questions from the county school board. We were required to send in a end of school year "report" so to speak, for us it was a SAT test the kids signed up to do (the test are mainly reading and basic reasoning, very easy). There are many tests out there they will accept, and due to the high number of home-schoolers  there are many avenues for testing.  In my opinion school boards love Home-Schoolers because they still get to collect the taxes and it lowers their class size. College is not a problem either, when my eldest son signed up for college he took the standard SAT's and all I had to do was sign a form saying he graduated from home school....no report card, transcripts or anything. I think they realized that by law they HAD to accept any grade I gave him and I could lie about it so they figure what's the use just sign a paper saying he Graduated....I know hard to believe but that is ALL I did.

Most kids in school only have about 2 hours of teaching a day by the time you factor in all the other "junk" they do. break time, lunch, changing class, roll call, settling everyone down etc and then they get almost no one on one teaching so you can home-school in a lot less time and you know what they will be taught. The neat thing is you can take vacations during the school year, the weather is better, no crowds etc and chalk it up as a field trip. You can visit interesting places and they can do a report about the history there and they will never forget it. A kid in school will never get that experience.
My kids loved home school, they would get up early and self start and be finished before lunch. All my kids played sports at the local High School, By law they had to be accepted but they were quickly liked by the coaches because they were generally more disciplined.  

We have stayed a week in Key West in the winter and the the kids would write  essays about the history and geography, something they never learn as well in a book. As I said earlier the state sets no curriculum you have a lot of freedom. Even High School is not hard, for example, you  have to have 2 years foreign language my daughter studied sign language, she had a book to study from and she would sit in the deaf section at church and in  few weeks she actually got good at it.

If you get in a group you will find TONS of support and help. You will find other parents who will co-op their skills to teach groups of kids once a week. The big thing for me is they wont be indoctrinated by the liberal teachings like "hug a tree day" or learn  America is the scourge of the planet.
One of the neatest stories was when my son was in college a professor asked him after class where he went to school because he was so disciplined and knew how to think for himself when he said he was home-schooled the professor told him any home schooled kid would always be welcome in his class.
Nobody cares about your kids like you do so why leave it to a government  employee to teach them their values.

On a final note, you never know the friends your kids will make in a home-school group. My 3 sons played flag football with a little home-school kid, they got to be friends, he would sometimes come with his mother to our home and play and they would go to his home as well, His name?............. Tim Tebow.