Why I Chose to Teach (Homeschool): Steemiteducation Homework!

Photo by one of my former students and someone I admire greatly: Kara at K.S. Visual Media

@steemiteducation Homework: Why did you become a teacher?

I remember being 9 or 10, those are really my earliest memories. I wanted to be a singer or actress, a mom and a teacher. That was my life plan.

We moved a LOT when I was little. We moved houses so often that I literally attended 23 different schools in the same state by the time I was in my last year of elementary school (6th grade at that time). I didn’t have the greatest home life and I spent a lot of time in my imagination. I wanted to be a mom and a teacher and an actress so much that all of my free time was spent writing and performing plays with my friends, playing house or playing school with my brothers and any other younger kids I could find.

I had loads of books that I made little library cards for. I created worksheets and rifled through all the boxes of leftovers that my teachers would let me have at the end of the school year.

At some point I really wanted to just be a wife, mom and teacher. The acting/singing dream was still there, but it definitely took a backseat to being a mom and teaching.

I graduated high school and after a few years (and a story that you probably honestly wouldn’t even believe), I ended up married to the love of my life and we had kids fairly quickly.

When my oldest turned 3, she was obsessed with learning everything. She wanted to read so bad, she would ‘pretend’ to read to her baby siblings or her dolls for long periods of time every day. She would write her ‘letters’ and even wrote letters to her grandma in “cursive”. At some point I gave up waiting and started to teach her to read and write. She was reading Dr. Seuss easy readers before she even turned four. By the time she was turning five, she could read and write at a first grade level, but her birthday missed the cut off for kindergarten by two weeks.

I called the principal to ask if there was any way that she could start school that year. He said no. I told him that I was concerned that she was going to be so far advanced by the following year that she’d just be bored. He said something that really caught me off guard, “Listen, we can’t treat children as individuals in public school. It just leads to too many problems.”

That sentence alone made me question whether that school was the right choice. I didn't know at the time that I had any choice, though.

At that point, my mom had a friend who was homeschooling her kids. At this point in the US, homeschooling was still frowned upon and still illegal in some places. It hadn’t been that long ago that a family had landed in jail for homeschooling their children. I wasn’t really interested. Plus, it would be an awful lot of work to teach AND try to just be a mom and a wife!

That’s where it started. Each year, I’d think that we’d just do it ‘one more year’... and yet, here I am 23 years later and my youngest child at 17 is attending a local Tech school for her last years of high school after being homeschooled all the rest of the way through. Three others homeschooled solely until their last year of high school, when they, too, attended Tech to finish up their high school. My oldest son went to public school from 10th grade on.

It was quite the journey, and I know I didn’t do everything perfectly, but I would definitely choose to do it again. Between the homeschool co-op classes I taught (Art, Drama, Fitness & Nutrition) and the homeschool plays I wrote, directed and produced at local community theaters AND the homeschool proms that my husband and I put on in the later years… the years of travel and homeschooling whilst living on a bus and traveling the US for a few years and THEN living on a sailboat and homeschooling throughout the Caribbean... it has been an amazing experience.

So, that is the long and the short of WHY I became a teacher… there are a million other things I could say that I learned over the last two plus decades about learning styles, about parenting, about teaching and mentoring… but I’ll leave those for a different post.

I'll leave it with this, the reasons I chose to START teaching and the reasons I KEPT teaching are different and varied. It all boils down to the desire to raise my children in such a way that they learned to use their strengths, acknowledge their weaknesses and deal with it and to always have the tools they need to know HOW to learn, no matter what it is they want to know. It's quite simplified, but that's the gist of it.

Here is another DIY #steemiteducation post DIY Easy Snowman Garland

And, if you're interested in learning more about me/our vastly varied life:

My #introduceyourself post

My First Tattoo (and other stupid decisions)

The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t (Broke Ass Parenting Win)

Living the Storm (a small story from our life on a sailboat)