Why a Schoolteacher is Quitting Her Job and Homeschooling

I posted an awesome article about homeschooling on my homeschool blog.  It was originally from Ladies Against Feminism. 

At my annual review yesterday, my principal gave me quite the compliment. He said, “I love the way you make everyone around you want to be smarter. I finish talking to you and I think to myself, ‘I’ve got to read more!’” We talked about that for a bit, and I realized that the thing that makes me valuable as a schoolteacher is the same thing that makes leaving my job and homeschooling imperative. That thing is a love of excellence.My parents were committed to getting me an excellent education, and thus moved me around from school to school. I went to seven different schools by the time I was in ninth grade. I was the “new kid” for all three years of junior high. I went to a variety of schools, including an all-girls school, a progressive public school, and then a fantastically wealthy public high school that looked like a country club. I also spent three years being homeschooled full-time during elementary school, and homeschooled myself part-time for the last two years of high school. (Yes, you really can do that.)



I can say that every school I went to was exceptionally damaging to my sense of self-worth and my education. Being the socially clueless kid with a bad hair cut (and, later, with train wreck acne) did me no favors in a system where being pretty and hip is a prerequisite to being accepted. Each of my schools had a different system of education where the focus seemed to be on new methods and rearranging the desks every few months. None of the schools focused on assessing student learning. One could know nothing about the subject being tested, fail the test, and get a B because of homework and participation. That kind of grade reflects docility, not knowledge. Nobody seems to care if students actually learn anything, so long as it looks like the teacher is teaching. That’s an important distinction.


The only types of schooling that worked for me were homeschooling and college. I’ve never been good at staying focused on tasks that are drawn out. If learning a new math skill should take 10 minutes to teach and 50 minutes to practice, then so be it—I’m your girl. I’ll listen closely, work hard, and follow your advice. However, I have never been able to focus on a 45-minute lecture while sifting out the 10 minutes worth of usable material. My response in school was always, “I guess I don’t really need to know this, since nobody can explain how it works or why it’s useful.” Asking things like, “How can I use this information?” or “How will I know that I’ve mastered this skill?” were treated like mutiny. (I don’t remember this, but eyewitnesses swear that it’s true: when I was a junior in high school, a few weeks into an allegedly tough English class, the teacher, who routinely graded papers with college-level rubrics, had us pick out plastic animal figurines from a bag, then sculpt our bodies so that we resembled the animal. Apparently my response was, “This is malarkey; I am not doing it,” and then I walked out of the classroom. I do remember dropping the class and homeschooling myself in English, German, and humanities for the rest of the year, taking just a few classes for the rest of high school.)


Based on my experience, I believe that students in regular classrooms learn many self-defeating lessons from their teachers and classmates.

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