The OPEN PAGE is a blog written by teens in Mariposa County, located in the Western Sierra Mountains of Central California. Please include your full name and age with your submission.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Home Schooling

By Paul Wilson

I have never set foot in a public school for education purposes in my life. Does that mean I’m completely illiterate? No, I’ve been home schooled my whole life. My older brother and sister were also home schooled, and when I was young I felt I was behind them. So, I asked if I could start kindergarten. I was about three and my mom was planning on starting me in kindergarten when I was 4. I didn’t want to wait that long, so, I decided that I would teach myself. I proceeded to do so, and I taught myself some things right and some things completely wrong. My mom realized that I would probably continue to teach myself wrong, so she gave me some basic phonics and the alphabet to learn. Essentially, I ended up doing kindergarten twice, both that year and the next.

Because I’ve never attended a public school, I don’t know what is required for the different grades. For my schooling to be officially recognized, we register as a private school, but we are not connected with the public school system in any way. To get a high school diploma, I am going to take the California High School Proficiency Exam. People in public high school can take this exam to test out of the later years of high school. A good example of how different my schooling is from public school would be my P.E. It is quite a bit different than a public school’s program. My friends say that I’m lucky that I get to ride my bike in the skate park as my P.E. I have to agree with them.

I also have the advantage of being able to do my schoolwork whenever I want. For example, if I want to do something during the afternoon, I can get up early and finish my schoolwork before I leave. Also, because my schedule is essentially governed by me, my mom and my dad, I normally start my school year sometime in mid-to-late September, and end it in early May. I still do the same amount of schoolwork that other kids do, but we don’t take as much vacation time during the school year, giving me a longer summer vacation.

Normally I spend much of my summer working, most of the time with my dad, who is a painting contractor. I have also worked at a custom cabinet shop. I got that job because I was working there one day a week during the school year as part of my Work Experience. They liked the quality of my work, so, after I finished the school year, I was hired to work full-time during the summer. The job was a good bit better than the standard job of mowing lawns and raking most teenagers do for a job. Lots of the cabinet jobs we did cost more then 5 digits. Some even cost several hundred thousand dollars. Working in a shop like that was a lot more fun then mowing a lawn, in my opinion. I doubt I would have gotten the job at the cabinet shop if I hadn’t been home schooled, because fitting in a full day of Work Experience would have been hard if I attended public school.

 
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