Homeschooling High School Students

While children around the country are slowly filing into their respective schools for those uncertain first few days, we are quite settled in here. Our first day of school started on August 7 this year. As a family, we decided that if we started even earlier than the year before we could school four days a week. I let the children decide which day of the week they would like to have off. I had planned on Monday, not because I liked the idea, but because I know that Monday is the hardest day to get moving.

Surprisingly they chose Friday, explaining that they felt it would be a break from their week of hard work. I had sat down with the calendar and calculated exactly when we would have to start and end in order to meet the 180-day requirement of our state. This year, having a high school student, I had to make sure I knew exactly how many minutes he would have to work each of those four days to earn a "unit" needed in specific classes.

I have numbers written throughout my "homeschool" notebook so that I know exactly what is needed. 180 days of school, 990 hours per year, 6,480 minutes per academic per year, 4 units of English.....the list goes on and on. When it comes to homeschooling your highschooler, suddenly everything changes. So I guess you could say that my children are settled in. I, on the other hand, find myself as anxious as I was the very first day, three years ago, when we began our homeschooling journey.

Just as things get more complicated as a publicly schooled child progresses from middle school to high school, it gets a bit more complicated for the homeschooler who suddenly has to keep track of the minutes he or she spends in each subject. Add to it the fact that in our state a highschool student needs three electives and you've got me, the anxious and eager "to get it just right" mom.

In my quest to get it right, I have joined an additional yahoo group. This new group is for homeschooling moms with high school students who wish to pursue college after homeschooling.

My son loves math and science and is deciding between pursuing some kind of business degree or becoming a veterinarian. It finally dawned on me....the great responsibility I have for his life. I can make or break his future. It's up to me to make sure he has all the right classes during his high school years so he can pursue either of his interests. I've never doubted my ability to homeschool until this particular year. It reminds me of climbing the high diving board at the pool. When you're going up the ladder, you're all ready to go. When you get to the edge of that diving board, it hits you. Can you really do this? Though there are two ways down, once you've gone that far you hate to climb back down. So it's sink or swim.

Never having been a quitter, and always enjoying a challenge, I decided to swim. I can do this, I told myself. I just need to learn as much as I can, talk to other moms who are homeschooling high schoolers and cull pearls of wisdom from moms who have "been there and done that". I dove in headfirst. Now you may recall that we belong to a wonderful and supportive homeschool group already. We love the activities, sports and events, but we also happened to be one of only two families with high school age children. So I needed to go outside my comfortable group of moms and find moms who were doing what I had to do as well as moms who had done it and succeeded. Fortunately I found Barbara, a homeschooling mom of three college students.

Though she lives far from my home, the gift of email makes it possible to "chat" back and forth. I learned that Barbara had three homeschoolers in college and one senior left at home. Barbara was only too happy to "translate" the high school regulations laid out by the board of education. She helped me figure out roughly how many minutes each academic needed spent on it and how to choose electives. Electives were causing me endless anxiety. Barbara explained that electives can be anything your child is interested in. Once I heard that, I sat down with my son and he came up with three electives he wished to pursue: Spanish, Real Estate and Public Speaking. From there I had only to do a little research to find the materials I would need to make up my own lessons.

Slowly I am learning that when it comes to elective courses, making up a curriculum is not as difficult as I thought. Though more challenging it's possible to teach these "new" courses, thanks to the tremendous amount of books, CDs and information available on the internet and in the library. And I also found out that I don't have to "get it just right" by myself. Many moms were happy to let me know that my son can take courses from outside sources, tutors and even the community college. I've still got all those numbers scribbled in my homeschool notebook but I'm calming down. As Barbara would say "Don't get too caught up in the numbers. Enjoy homeschooling your highschooler!"

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