My wife and I home-school our four children. It has, over the past two years, become a wonderful experiment in learning and family cohesion. The children have bloomed academically, and even as we find bumps in the road, it always seems to get a little bit better.
However, now and then you get a real eye-opener. Like today, when my daughter exhibited that her vocabulary far out-strips the average seven-year-old. She was talking about her imaginary friends, the ones that make appearances every six months or so. Their names are ‘Bloody and Daisy.’ She can’t describe them; that would put a hex on the wonder; it would put into concrete something so wonderfully ethereal and full of possibilities. I understand. She’ll describe Daisy’s dress as a lovely green affair, that flows when Daisy flies, but she won’t describe Daisy.
However, she did describe Bloody today. Bloody has short, brown/black hair and is…I pause to take a breath…’a hermaphrodite, Papa. Sometimes Bloody is a boy, and sometimes Bloody is a girl.’
A hermaphrodite? As Scooby Doo would say, ‘ruh roh.’ Maybe her older brothers have been more of an influence than I realized. They teach her all kinds of things, from history to science, personal combat to family stories, but this was a unique one. A hermaphrodite? Dear, dear Elysabeth. I’m glad we’re homeschooling you. That one would have raised some eyebrows at the Christian school, now wouldn’t it?
An education and a vocabulary are powerful. They allow my eight-year-old boy to say he finds something ‘irksome.’ They teach my oldest boy, at 13, to connect the occipital lobe with vision, because oculus means eye in Latin. They keep my 11-year-old male progeny looking for a way to marry magnets and perpetual motion. But hermaphrodites?
What can I say. She is God’s child. He clearly has a plan for her that involves a sharp mind. And after all, God certainly loves hermaphrodites, too.
But couldn’t Bloody have just been an anthropologist or cellist?
The ups are self satisfaction, the downs are they are going to have potentials that you and I never had. Think about it, we went through this” great education” that “MOLDED US” into a system that has “failed” in many ways. Have we led and controlled our health care system? It is hard to become politically correct when home schooled. My wife and I home schooled three boys. We are still waiting to be rejected…Great kids, however we did not home school them so much to make them “academicaly great” but rather to develop emotinally and morally without today’s peer… Read more »
Bravo to you for homeschooling your kids!
I was partially homeschooled myself.
Once they get to college, I think they will find they’re far, far advanced academically beyond their peers.
The previous comment is right, though–it’s awfully hard to relate to your own age group when you’re homeschooled!
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The ups are self satisfaction, the downs are they are going to have potentials that you and I never had. Think about it, we went through this” great education” that “MOLDED US” into a system that has “failed” in many ways. Have we led and controlled our health care system? It is hard to become politically correct when home schooled. My wife and I home schooled three boys. We are still waiting to be rejected…Great kids, however we did not home school them so much to make them “academicaly great” but rather to develop emotinally and morally without today’s peer… Read more »
Bravo to you for homeschooling your kids!
I was partially homeschooled myself.
Once they get to college, I think they will find they’re far, far advanced academically beyond their peers.
The previous comment is right, though–it’s awfully hard to relate to your own age group when you’re homeschooled!
Krissa
Really cool post, highly informative and professionally written..Good Job