How I Was Homeschooled

From a pretty early age, I’ve been homeschooled along with my siblings. But what exactly do I mean when I say that? It can be difficult to get solid information on how homeschooling works, primarily because “homeschooling” is really a big bucket full of many philosophies, reasons, and families.

Most people homeschool because they want or need to school their children differently than how the public school system does it. There are a number of ways this could present itself: there are highly educated professionals who believe they are more capable than a public school teacher to teach their children; there are parents of children with developmental disabilities who believe they will be able to help their children individually better than a public school teacher who has to corral fifty kids each day; and many more.

Across these various reasons, the most common method of organizing the homeschooling process between two parents is to have one parent working, and the other staying home to homeschool the kids. This seems like the sane route: after all, so goes the common wisdom, kids take up a lot of time and require a lot of attention. If the breadwinner has an office job, they’re not going to be home often enough to help the kids; if they work from home, the kids will be bothering them with questions so often that they can’t focus on working.

For most families, this probably is the sane route. But my mother, Stanford graduate, pilot, researcher for NASA, cancer survivor and entrepreneur, would not take “sane” for an answer. Throughout her childrens’ entire homeschooled lives, my mother has been working around 50 hours a week, plus running three small businesses. And this has created a very strange kind of homeschooling, with some very strange and specific benefits and drawbacks.

The obvious drawback is that she’s had a lot less time to spend on homeschooling her children. And at first, when we were just quitting traditional school, and when we were just getting used to the concept of working from home, it was difficult. But rather quickly, it developed into a bunch of neat advantages.

Firstly, since she’s been actively working a career, she factored a ton of career preparation into our homeschooling. Where a lot of homeschool parents are myopically focused on getting their kids prepared for college, my mother was also preparing her children to work. With that in combination with our work for her businesses, we got a very well-rounded and immersive understanding of careers and business.

Second, since several of her jobs have involved hiring entry-level employees, she knows what colleges tend to prepare people for, as well as what they don’t. With that knowledge, she could systematically teach us the things that we would need to know for our future careers that we probably wouldn’t learn otherwise.

One such lesson that I learned very, very early on was the importance of a positive attitude. If you’re willing to learn and you’re cheerful, everyone will be happy with you, even if you aren’t very good at your job. But on the other hand, if you’re an asshole, you have to be leaps and bounds better than everyone else – I’m talking twice as good as everyone else in the office, combined – for people to tolerate you enough to keep you. You don’t learn that in high school or in college: if you show up and you learn the material and you get good grades, literally nobody cares how pleasant you were to be around while you did it.

It wasn’t just the career itself. It was also the apparent drawback of her lack of available time that also turned out to be helpful.

My mother was never available at the drop of a dime. I had to wait for her to be done working, and I frequently had to plan out when I needed to talk to her about something. I got used to sending her emails asking for help with things. More recently, I’ve had mentors that I can contact, I see a lot of the same thing that I got used to growing up. You can’t take for granted unlimited time from a mentor. They’ve got a full-time job, and though they’re happy to help, their time is a limited resource. So it was with my mother growing up.

If you think about it, this is the polar opposite of the public school system model, where the teacher’s job is to teach, and nothing else. People don’t value what is abundantly available, and you can tell that school kids don’t value the time of their teachers. But you can be sure that employees value the time of their mentors, because they know that their mentors have important, unrelated jobs. And so my siblings and I valued our mother’s time, like we would value a mentor’s.

Further, sometimes we just couldn’t reach her. Sometimes she was at the office, on a business trip, or her clients were having time-sensitive issues. And so, sometimes we just had to find an answer from somewhere else. This was another way in which our education was very different from the traditional school system: a school teacher is supposed to have all the answers to all the student’s questions. A student’s first, last, and usually only resource is their teacher. On the other hand, my mother’s semi-frequent absences meant that to answer our questions, we had to do research on our own, or reach out to each other.

The relationship I had with my mother, and the relatively unique type of homeschooling that we all had growing up, was useful in a number of ways for shaping all of us. I’m glad she was crazy enough to do it.