Objections included ones I’ve heard for years, about “disrupting the class,” “distracting our students,” “lowering, potentially, our standards,” and the “immaturity” of sheltered homeschoolers.
We decided to try it anyway.
And the objections turned out to be, almost entirely, wrong. New kid in Spanish? Our students perk up and pay attention—who is this person? As Elton Mayo’s “Hawthorne experiments” showed early in the 20th century, change provokes an increase in productivity.
Also, any doubts we had about homeschool students’ preparation were largely unfounded. It’s true that they often don’t have a complete background in everything we could wish. I came to picture the profile of their knowledge like a piece of Swiss cheese—very solid in some areas (knows all about ancient Egypt), very empty in others (often, math). By contrast, students with a more conventional preparation—public middle school or Waldorf middle school—are more like cake, less dense than cheese, but with smaller holes.
Despite this contrast, which I’ve characterized only generally (and I’ve ignored the real differences between public middle school and Waldorf middle school students, a topic for another time), homeschool students are almost always eager to learn and have excellent work habits. If there are holes to fill, they fill them rapidly and well. Basically, kids everywhere are probably more resilient than we often give them credit for being, and, in the absence of experience, stereotypes about homeschooling (or Waldorf schooling) can spin far from reality.
Socially, too, the homeschool kids tend to fit right in. They are generally a bit quieter—new kids usually are—and more mature (less immature peer pressure and exposure in their lives?), but navigate quickly and successfully within a class.
The largest benefit, however, is not one we had anticipated.
Nearly every homeschool student who enrolls for a course or two—there have now been at least twelve (some of whom had tried other schools before coming to us)—enrolls as a full time student within a few weeks. The students discover the pleasure of the company of their peers, and parents are reassured that our school isn’t the “prison” one parent told me she believed it would be for her son. I also guess that parents, in many cases, feel some relief in not to have to carry on homeschooling an adolescent through high school.
Win. Win.
