I ended up homeschooling my kids. They just didn't really fit in the public school system that well.
We were a military family living on an isolated military base in the middle of nowhere and the schools sucked. Some folks reacted to that by taking their kids to private schools in town roughly an hour away but for us homeschooling was the solution that made sense.
I enrolled in some email lists to get support for homeschooling my sons. I did look around and there just wasn't some kind of in person group available that met my needs and I didn't see it making sense to try to start one, though I also actually did look into doing that.
Homeschooling had kind of a bad reputation at the time as the sort of thing done by religious weirdos in a cult-like atmosphere who didn't want society having any influence over their children. I tend to forget that homeschooling had such a bad reputation because I was on lists for gifted homeschoolers and it was about academic rigor for kids who needed more than the local school system could do for their bright kids.
I ended up volunteering to be a moderator on a gifted homeschooler's list called TAGMAX and about six weeks after I started working as a moderator for this one email list I was offered a promotion to Director of Community Life. Valorie King, founder of the group of email lists, saw something special in me and wanted me to be lead moderator for all the lists she ran, basically.
I accepted that position and it was while I was Director of Community Life that TAGPDQ was launched, though it had been in the works before I came on board. This was a new list for parents of kids who were very, very gifted and PDQ was intended to mean pretty darn quick.
Valorie King's assessment of my ability was probably accurate. There probably is something special about me because I managed to get folks to talk on that list and I think that list more or less died after I stopped participating.
It's challenging to get folks to talk on a gifted support list, even more so on a support list for exceptionally and profoundly gifted. It's very hard to get folks comfortable with saying "I have a super, super smart kid and it's a PROBLEM!" and I was able to make folks feel comfortable talking there.
One source of friction on TAGPDQ was that folks who homeschooled would enthusiastically recommend homeschooling as The Solution anytime someone complained about school issues and folks who didn't want to homeschool felt like they were being criticized or something. And homeschoolers also felt equally criticized all the time by everyone.
So I believe it was on TAGPDQ that someone posted an article one day about a court case where the judge said something about the defendant's homeschooling and kind of gave him a slap on the wrist. Some homeschooler was like "He wasn't even homeschooled. They are blaming this on homeschooling and he wasn't even homeschooled!" and generally having a cow about prejudice out in the world towards homeschoolers.
I piped up and said something like "I think the judge likely doesn't actually mean home schooling. I think he probably means that old fashioned term home training and was basically saying Boy, you weren't raised right. I think the judge was basically saying You screwed up because your parents didn't do their job properly of teaching you how to behave yourself in this world. You got no sense and it's not your fault. It's the fault of your parents."
Some kids need more help in that department than others. I keep trying to figure out how to write about parenting because my kids needed a lot of help in that department and I like my grown children.
And my grown children like me. At some point in his like late teens and/or early twenties, my oldest began saying to me on a very regular basis "You are an awesome mom and I am so glad you raised me."
I would ask him "What makes you say that?" and it almost always boiled down to something he read on the internet cluing him that other kids with the kinds of issues he had just didn't get the kind of support he got from me. He was beginning to see the road not taken and that having the option to not take that road was an amazing lucky stroke for him that most kids like him simply never get.
We were a military family living on an isolated military base in the middle of nowhere and the schools sucked. Some folks reacted to that by taking their kids to private schools in town roughly an hour away but for us homeschooling was the solution that made sense.
I enrolled in some email lists to get support for homeschooling my sons. I did look around and there just wasn't some kind of in person group available that met my needs and I didn't see it making sense to try to start one, though I also actually did look into doing that.
Homeschooling had kind of a bad reputation at the time as the sort of thing done by religious weirdos in a cult-like atmosphere who didn't want society having any influence over their children. I tend to forget that homeschooling had such a bad reputation because I was on lists for gifted homeschoolers and it was about academic rigor for kids who needed more than the local school system could do for their bright kids.
I ended up volunteering to be a moderator on a gifted homeschooler's list called TAGMAX and about six weeks after I started working as a moderator for this one email list I was offered a promotion to Director of Community Life. Valorie King, founder of the group of email lists, saw something special in me and wanted me to be lead moderator for all the lists she ran, basically.
I accepted that position and it was while I was Director of Community Life that TAGPDQ was launched, though it had been in the works before I came on board. This was a new list for parents of kids who were very, very gifted and PDQ was intended to mean pretty darn quick.
Valorie King's assessment of my ability was probably accurate. There probably is something special about me because I managed to get folks to talk on that list and I think that list more or less died after I stopped participating.
It's challenging to get folks to talk on a gifted support list, even more so on a support list for exceptionally and profoundly gifted. It's very hard to get folks comfortable with saying "I have a super, super smart kid and it's a PROBLEM!" and I was able to make folks feel comfortable talking there.
One source of friction on TAGPDQ was that folks who homeschooled would enthusiastically recommend homeschooling as The Solution anytime someone complained about school issues and folks who didn't want to homeschool felt like they were being criticized or something. And homeschoolers also felt equally criticized all the time by everyone.
So I believe it was on TAGPDQ that someone posted an article one day about a court case where the judge said something about the defendant's homeschooling and kind of gave him a slap on the wrist. Some homeschooler was like "He wasn't even homeschooled. They are blaming this on homeschooling and he wasn't even homeschooled!" and generally having a cow about prejudice out in the world towards homeschoolers.
I piped up and said something like "I think the judge likely doesn't actually mean home schooling. I think he probably means that old fashioned term home training and was basically saying Boy, you weren't raised right. I think the judge was basically saying You screwed up because your parents didn't do their job properly of teaching you how to behave yourself in this world. You got no sense and it's not your fault. It's the fault of your parents."
Some kids need more help in that department than others. I keep trying to figure out how to write about parenting because my kids needed a lot of help in that department and I like my grown children.
And my grown children like me. At some point in his like late teens and/or early twenties, my oldest began saying to me on a very regular basis "You are an awesome mom and I am so glad you raised me."
I would ask him "What makes you say that?" and it almost always boiled down to something he read on the internet cluing him that other kids with the kinds of issues he had just didn't get the kind of support he got from me. He was beginning to see the road not taken and that having the option to not take that road was an amazing lucky stroke for him that most kids like him simply never get.