I have returned, with more First Impressions

If anyone was thinking my blog was dead, they were wrong! I took a break from most of my usual Internet activities during Lent.

In the near future, I have plans to write about my own home education plans and ideas, the reactions of those around me, and of course introduce my children and their works!

First Impressions Part III

When I was in high school I was very active at church, I got to know almost everyone who went to daily services and some of their families. I was also involved in the youth group. Which is where my next encounter with homeschooling began.

These two families are actually related and were fairly conservative for people attending the Vatican II church. They were actually the first families I met who gave me a favorable impression of homeschooling. I'd like to say that in both families, all of the children were nice and relatively innocent. I would not say that "Family A" put homeschooled out of any love for education but rather because of religious reasons. However, "Family B" was probably homeschooling for religious and academic reasons. So anyways, I continued to have social dealings with both families over the years and was able to gain a more realistic impression of homeschooling.

Both families changed my mind about the socialization issue. I would like to say that the children in Family B, had better manners and were able to communicate better with all sorts of people than their relations in Family A. At times, the children in Family A did things that were socially inappropriate and acted like they were in their own world. However, knowing the parents made me understand this all together: If you have a parent that is weird, usually the children are weird.

I began to understand that homeschooling and homeschoolers could take on so many different qualities and they were dependent often on the parents and their style or approach to home education.

In the case of Family B, I saw that homeschooling produced smart and funny people-- the kind of people everyone loves to have around. The children of both families were also very prayerful and took their faith seriously. At this point my view of homeschooling began to change.

It was also during this time that I spent half of my waking hours on the Internet chatting with other Catholics. During this time I met what most people know as "traditional Catholics." I didn't know I was on the road to becoming one, but that it another story for another day. Most of these people homeschooled. They showed me that their children loved God and the Catholic Faith, they showed me that homeschooling could produce exactly the kind of child that I would want for myself. These people also introduced me to many of the traditional Catholic homeschooling websites, which I read, looked over their curriculum and was very pleased with. I even pleaded with my own mother to take my little sister out of school and homeschool.

Before I knew it, I was totally in support of homeschooling and knew from the age of 18 that I was going to homeschool my children.

So at 19, when I met my future husband, we were already in agreement about homeschooling, and there was nothing more to do than dream of the day when we would have children of our own to teach.