Curious to know more about people's experiences:
- Any online communities that have been helpful
- Good app / platform recs that have been useful along the way
- How was the transition to college (if attended) and adulthood if your kid is already grown up
- Anything that was a game changer that helped make homeschooling a positive experience
Game-changers for me growing up, that I think my parents did really well: - change the curriculum to match the kid (i.e. learning styles, difficulty, pace) - use the public schools for electives, sports, drama, etc (my siblings took music classes for 1 period each day, we all did school sports still, etc) - have strict (or at least structured) time constraints on homeschooling (i.e. don't let it drag into the whole day; we had to be up, dressed, breakfasted, and ready to start at 9am, and we needed to be done by noon and didn't get lunch until our school work was done).
I am not surprised this is a salient childhood memory.
It wasn't oppressive. It was disciplined. I learned more in 3 hours at home than I did my senior year going to public high school for 8 hours a day.
I expect it was quite motivating at the most basic of levels.
In a positive or negative way?
The benefits of school go beyond what the teachers teach.
They were definitely easy to pick out, but I think in a good way. They were undersocialized with children, but felt way more at ease around adults. They understood more mature humor, spoke larger ideas in better sentences, and behaved perfectly.
And sure, they were a little "weird." As everyone ought to strive to be.
I only had one on my baseball team in the spring, while he was definitely not on the same level as the rest of the team socially, it could have just been that he is a shy kid by nature.
We lived in different countries where people speak a different language, during their earlier years, though, so maybe that also contributes to it.
I can also usually tell just based on the kids if their parents will be helpful or not. If I ask for a parent to help with setting up at the beginning of practice, or if an assistant coach can't make it and I need a hand, the way a kid acts is a pretty good indicator if their parent will get out of their chair on sidelines and come help.
There are outliers, but its a pretty good rule of thumb.
Although they have a bias that makes their attribution of positives and negatives imprecise, the list of top-upvoted posts of all time on the Reddit subreddit /r/homeschoolrecovery contains many examples to motivate wanting a success story and not a failure story.
It's not all doom and gloom. The success stories of homeschooling outperform even wealthy public schools in life outcomes and health, so the reward is there.
We have a group chat and since they were in middle school (I really should've started this sooner), they'd write a few paragraphs about their day. What they've done, the experiences, the new things they learned, etc. I was very strict about it. Sometimes I would wake the kids if they forgot to write anything. That really pissed off my wife, she'd be like: "you're punishing them over nothing". Sometimes I would forget to check, and they'd miss a day or a few. Then I would force them to backfill the missed days, etc.
This simple, daily exercise turned out to be the best possible gift with enormous compounding effect. My daughter at some point got the presidential award of academic excellence, my son went to college and received a scholarship, for a while he was a competitive swimmer, with dozens of medals - his HS team got second place and a state record, and all.
If you have kids, ask them for this simplest possible thing, start as early as you could. I promise you, years later, one day, they will be thanking you, and this random person on HN.
I used to teach a homeschool PE class that was really just socialization with a theme.