I Didnt Choose Home Schooling :: Personal Narrative, education

I Didnt Choose Home Schooling   I didnt choose to be taught at home my parents decided for me. I was four, and my toddler priorities lay elsewhere. Little did I know that I was volunteering for an educational experiment. Every September my parents and I had our one-year discussion about continuing home schooling versus sending me to regular school. I dont know if I thought school would be a piece of music boring or if I was afraid of change, entirely I always chose to stay home. I did go to school for a few classes and for violin lessons, but much of my time there was spent explaining my sporadic attendance to teachers and classmates. I grew accustomed to giving both rote and wry answers to questions like, Do you watch TV all day? The rote answer was No, of course not. I do the same things you do in school. The wry answer was Yes, from nine to noon, watching their faces shit into expressions of disbelief. I didnt tell them I was watching Massachusetts Educational Television on PBS.   When discussing home schooling with strangers or skeptical parents, the first question commonly concerns socialization, often posed bluntly as Do you have any friends? Sports and orchestra brought me into contact with kids my age, but point then it was a common care rather than a common age that drew us together. Over the years, I found wonderful friends in Mendelssohn, O. Henry, a German woman on my paper route who was a World War II refugee, Newsweek, a paralyzed basketball coach who couldnt walk but still coached me as if he could, history books, and a range of musical instruments from viola to tinwhistle. People are always relieved to discover that Im not a hermit.   Home schooling gave me the license to explore and experiment. We Traded houses with an Irish family and lived in Galway for a month. I was never given actual lessons on how to write a sentence I learned as I wrote history essays. Few schools would have allowed me to research the sinking of the Titanic, but my parents let me read about it, build models of it and learn about watertight bulkheads. (I even managed to finish my math book that year, too.)   As I got older, people started to ask if being taught at home was going to hinder me in college.