WARNING: This article is a bit long, so you can safely skim over the nitty gritty details. But please do look at some of the bullet points, and definitely read the conclusion at the bottom of this page.
I have been homeschooling for roughly a year and a half now, so I decided that it would be a good idea if I shared some of my thoughts about homeschooling.
Overall, homeschooling is a very different system than online school or regular school. There are (of course) many benefits to homeschooling, but also many cons also. So it doesn’t matter which system you prefer: there is always a good side and a bad side to it.
As many of you guys know, I moved to Taiwan at the beginning of October 2019. I was very reluctant to leave many of my classmates whom I have known in my elementary and early middle school grades.
I could not attend the local middle schools in Taiwan because I knew that my Chinese wasn’t good enough. I could speak fluently, but my writing and reading skills were inadequate. In addition, there were many international and American schools in the country, but they were too expensive for our family to afford.
So that’s when I decided to officially homeschool. And boy, did I discover a lot.
I will now share with you some of the major aspects of homeschooling in the sections below.
School Subjects:
To this day, I admit that I still cannot get the four main school subjects in my homeschool. It turns out when I get interested in a subject, I usually dive in and research on it until I have the answer to all my questions.
In other words, I still can’t balance out my school subjects in a single day.
Let’s get it down to what I did for each subject…
- Math: I absolutely love math. In fact, I’m willing to spend a whole day solving AIME problems, playing FTW, doing Alcumus, and learning from math textbooks(happens a lot on weekends). So that’s why I always end up using 2-3 hours of my time doing math in my school day.
- Science: Science is pretty chill. I finished biology in the spring of 2020 (ahead of my peers) and started AP Biology for no reason (maybe I thought it was cool?). Except for the fact that I stopped doing AP Biology when I decided to devote my science time to another subject: physics. In addition, I have tried the Python and Javascript courses both from the brilliant coding website Code with Mosh. It turns out that I gave up when I was halfway through each of these courses, too. But now, I have finished Java Part 1 of the Ultimate Java Series, and now I am doing Java Part 2: Object-Oriented Programming.
- Book Project: I have started a novel (almost 100 pages now) called The Vengeance of Erblaw. It is a fantasy novel, and I wrote it because J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings inspired me so much that I decided to create a masterpiece of my own.
- English: In addition, I have started preparing for the SAT Reading/Writing Sections, because why not? The earlier the better. I also have Barron’s SAT Reading Workbook (very useful for reading comprehension), and Wordly Wise 3000 (which I find it absolutely boring).
- Reading: I also enjoy reading a variety of books, so I guess that counts as well.
- World History: Now here’s where my coursework gets messy. For world history, I end up reading an article from Khan Academy, or I don’t do it at all.
- World Language: For world language, I end up only doing Spanish on Wednesdays, right before my Spanish lesson on the day after.
Scheduling:
Here’s what my day looks like: (as of this month)
- Math: 2-3 hours (70-80% of my school day)
- Science (physics+coding): 1 hour (7-10%)
- Book project: *hopefully* 1 hour (5-10%)
- English: 30 min. – 1 hour (5%)
- World History: 0-30 minutes (0-3%)
- World Language: 1-2 hours (only on Wednesday, as of date)
- Extracurriculars: Swim team (2 hours per day), tutoring (1 hour on Saturdays)
- Violin: >30 minutes *ugh I need to practice more*
Note that these percentages are just my estimates.
Now you can see how unbalanced my schedule is. In regular school, each class takes about 50-60 minutes, with a class devoted to a particular subject. Students receive homework from that class and you are expected to complete it at home (homework, duh).
So in school, students learn a lot from each of the four core subjects, plus some extracurriculars and clubs.
But for me, I never learned something from each of the four core subjects for every single day of homeschooling. So, I still need to work on this aspect.
Curriculum and Course Structure:
Curriculum and course structure is also another one of my homeschool burdens. Whenever I try to find a curriculum for my grade level for, let’s say social studies, I can’t find a single one.
It turns out that either this is the case, or I am bad at searching on Google.
But at least I have a pile of resources for math and science.
Here’s my “coursework” for 9th grade:
- Math: AoPS (Art of Problem Solving) Textbooks and Forums, AIME handout, EGMO (Euclidean Geometry for Mathematical Olympiads by Evan Chen), AoPS Alcumus, and past AMC 10 tests for good measure.
- Science: Basic Physics: A Self-Teaching Guide (a bit outdated, to be honest), Khan Academy Physics, Code with Mosh, and Murach’s Java Programming (4th Edition)
- English: Barron’s SAT Reading Workbook, Wordly Wise 3000, Khan Academy SAT, Word Power Made Easy.
- World History: Khan Academy World History, Big Fat Notebook World History
- Extracurricular/clubs: Does playing chess online count as a chess club? Anyways, I have a 1500 blitz rating.
- World Language: Chinese Workbook (I barely use that, uh-oh), and Spanish Vocabulary.
You can now also see how unbalanced my coursework is: I have a lot more resources for mathematics than I do for World History or English.
But realize that the things I put for English and World History are merely resources. They help you learn, but they don’t serve as a complete 9th-grade course.
In other words, you don’t have to learn skill A in a week, take Test A, and move on to topic B. There’s no requirement for you to complete anything in order to finish “homeschooling” for the day.
This is the reason why many kids fall behind while they are homeschooling. I fear that I am one of them.
And how in the world are we going to know if we are behind, at or ahead grade level? The coursework for every district is the same, and even though Common Core is a widely accepted curriculum for math, it is way too easy for me. What about for other subjects?
To sum this up, I don’t think there is a “right curriculum”, but you still need to see if you are on track with grade level at some point in time. And since I’ve never found an actual course for English and World History, I appear to be mired in stress with these two subjects.
Conclusion:
So what can we conclude? What do I have to say to those parents who have considered homeschooling their child, whether they are in elementary or middle school?
For starters, I homeschooled all by myself. That means that my parents didn’t care a thing about what I was doing, except for reminders to stay focused.
So parents of homeschoolers: if you are thinking about teaching a lesson to your middle schooler/high schooler every single day, please don’t. They need to learn how to self-learn, so that they can succeed during college.
But if you get nothing else from this long article, here’s what I want you to take away:
Homeschooling is a very different system from regular school. So don’t expect for everything to work out in homeschooling: things will fail, and things will succeed. You are constantly improvising, which something that regular school can’t teach. Self-learning on your own can be a great experience, but make sure you are accomplishing something everyday. Stay on top of your work by tracking how you are doing with a school curriculum.
I might have missed something here and there, since I wrote this article over a course of two days, but here you go! Thanks so much for reading my thoughts on homeschooling! 😉