I home educated my son from the age of 13 until he went to college at 19. It’s a tough challenge, but sometimes you have to do what you know in your heart is right. Just for the record, he’s now at university, getting top grades and has the strongest work ethic and self-discipline of anyone I know.
But this post isn’t about my son; it’s about me. Almost all home educating parents will tell you one thing: you will learn as much as your child, if not more. As an English teacher and tutor, I work one-to-one with children, teenagers and adults and of course my home education experience does benefit my work. Here are five more surprising benefits, however, that enhance my life and my work every day:
- Home educating parents learn to be curious. Without the structure of a school curriculum, home educated students must learn to be driven by their own curiosity, and to foster this, parents practise curiosity too. I’ve always loved to learn, but now, especially with the aid of the internet, I often find myself falling down rabbit holes as I follow the thread of my own curiosity. I might find myself thinking ‘I wonder…’ and the next thing I know, I am busy trying to satisfy that curious thought. Luckily, Google means that my curiosity doesn’t cost me as much as it used to, as, in the past, I bought books to find more about about all sorts of subjects. I still buy books, just not as many!
- The habit of continual learning is related to curiosity. I am only really happy if I am learning something, often just for fun. I believe my home educating years kept my love of learning alive as I got older, At the moment it’s Latin. My current Duolingo streak is 47 days. I just wanted to see how much I remembered from my school days, and it turns out I do remember a fair bit. Ok, so Latin is definitely useful for my work as an English teacher, but it’s useless in terms of travel. I could be brushing up my French, Spanish, Italian, German or Japanese (all of which definitely need more work!) but I wanted to learn more Latin so that’s what I am doing. I will probably graduate to a ‘proper’ course later on as Duolingo doesn’t give me the opportunity to conjugate verbs and decline nouns which, embarrassingly, I used to enjoy a lot!
- The art of conversation. Conversation is crucial in most areas of life. As a home educating, part-time working, single parent, I spent most of the time I had with my son in conversation. He would ask me something random (and challenging) like ‘how does a mortgage work?’ and I would try to explain. We discussed anything and everything and we still do. Conversation is important in professional situations as well as for families, and can also help to dispel fear and discomfort around sensitive subjects. And for teaching, well, every teaching encounter is a two-way conversation for me.
- Home educating parents have to look outside the box. The box may be a syllabus, a lesson structure or an exam. None of these are actually essential for learning. It’s exciting to find new and creative ways to teach and learn. As a home educator, I had to ask myself many times, ‘does it really have to be done this way?’ I became used to answering, ‘no,’ and then finding a more appropriate way. Now, I try to translate this more individual and creative way of thinking into the rest of my life.
- Nothing is ever perfect or finished. Just because you’ve finished a lesson, passed an exam or completed a course, you are not necessarily ‘done’ with that subject. Learning is a lifelong process and home educating teaches us that neither life nor learning can really be neatly packaged into boxes, or ticked off as finished. We learn that imperfection is ok and there is no end to what is possible. Settling for imperfection also means embracing boundlessness.
Both in my job, working with my students, and managing my own life, goals and expectations, I find it really helpful to remember these lessons. Of course we have goals and targets, whether they are shared ones like exams or personal ones like work projects. The larger and more exciting reason for doing whatever we do, however, is to learn and grow, to discover where the adventure will take us next.
