Fall Semester Struggles

Disclaimer: Though actively attempting to keep this post short, I could not accomplish such. 

So, how did I change to independent studies?  Through a twisting path that started with the public school system, to community college, a variety of online courses, and one-on-one instruction.  

I started out looking at the independent studies program offered by the neighboring school district.  To my mom, this was great because someone would guide us.  To me, this seemed ideal, as it offered very flexible scheduling.  Students learn through self-paced online courses and/or textbook and worksheets and are kept on-track with weekly one-on-one meetings with an on-site teacher. As I wanted to take AP courses, I was limited to the online courses that the school used (Apex Learning). Although I enjoyed the self-paced aspect of Apex, the multiple choice questions were utterly infuriating.  Many questions, especially in English and History, should not have a single right answer, and my on-site teacher couldn’t explain why one answer was better than another. 

When I was about a week and a half into these courses, I met a dance mom and found out that she homeschooled her children. Not through an established school or a program, but as her own individual school. Previously, this had just seemed too scary to attempt, but driven by the frustrations with Apex, we looked into becoming a homeschool and found it actually was not hard to become a homeschool. 

The leap to true homeschool was not anything much for me. For my mother, however, there was extensive research and paperwork.  For me, it just meant stopping classes on Apex and finding a couple new classes.  (We did, however, spend an unnecessarily long amount of time determining the homeschool’s name, only to settle on “Loui Homeschool”) Latin, Math, and English at the Loui Homeschool were easily sorted out.  (I will talk about those subjects in a later post.)

History and Physics were tougher. I switched from Apex to the CTY Johns Hopkins online courses only to find once again the hated multiple choice quizzes.  In History, the quizzes were word for word questions about a single sentence in a 20-page reading. Physics was similarly difficult as a single typo or a number inputted in scientific notation instead of fully written out could be marked as incorrect.  I then briefly attempted History by simply teaching myself according to a syllabus, but reading a textbook straight through is as dry as dog food.  In the end, we decided to leave Physics and History to another semester.  My exploration through these courses showed that while I liked the flexibility of online courses, I missed the interaction with a teacher and classmates.  

My fall semester was a lot of exploring and switching around. I was determined to make this adventure into homeschooling work, but I was nervous that  jumping from course to course made me seem flighty. Much of the fall semester was spent trying to fine tune my curriculum and adjust to this new world of schooling. In the end, my fall semester was a patchwork of Stanford OHS, community college, and a private tutor. When I finally settled into all my classes–it took until the end of October–I was pleased with the classes I was taking. As I had personally picked each class, I was enrolled in classes where I liked both teacher and format. Though it most assuredly was not smooth in the beginning, my fall curriculum turned out to be a success.