In my previous post answering homeschool questions for a young lady who wants to homeschool her senior year of high school, it was clear that her questions were the result of 12+ years of public school restrictions. Even her follow up questions indicated that she expected homeschooling to be as restrictive and regimented as public school. In answer to her follow-up questions, “when are midterms and finals?, it was clear to me that she was not seeing beyond her current and past educational experiences. Here is my response to her.
Testing is up to you and the person who teaches you.
I may be hard to understand after 12 years of school, but homeschooling is not nearly as rigid as schools, and tests aren’t nearly as formal.
You need to:
1 Determine what you have already taken
2. Determine what you need to graduate.
3. Determine what you need to take.
4. Determine how you will go about taking those subjects.
There are no rules beyond this. You are in control of your education. You set your rules. You decide when to eat, sleep, get up, study, take vacations, etc.
Take care.
In summation, coming out of a public school atmosphere into homeschooling, is a hard concept for many people. They expect the same rules, regulations, and structure they had in school. Many kids actually keep this kind structure automatically for a couple of years coming out of homeschooling, until they look up and realize that they are schooling at warp speed because you get so much more work done at home. They relax after that.
For people who are comfortable with and thrive in that kind of structure, there is no reason to change it. But if it doesn’t work, then there is not reason to torture yourself with rules that don’t exist.
For more information, read:
Creating a Homeschool Schedule
Homeschooling on a Public School Schedule