Homeschooling Conference Part I: The Weird Factor

My apologies for being off for a few days without warning, but I decided at the last minute to try a computer fast since I’m connected far too often, despite my unswerving resistance to getting a Treo, BlackBerry, iPhone or the like. However, my little laptops (one IBM, one Mac) and my Sprint card are enough to keep me overly connected.

But I did it and I survived. It was quite nice.

As you know, I went to the California Homeschool Network 2008 Family Expo with several members of my family in tow. I, the brain surgeon, our three kids and three of their grandparents attended. My friend and her two children came along, as well, and we all had adjoining hotel rooms.

Overall, it was a great time and I learned quite a bit. It was a wonderful experience.

I think I’ll split this into three posts, since the conference was three days and tonight I’ll talk about day 1 (which was Friday).

First, I’m going to talk about the weird factor, and thereby risk completely alienating myself from the entire homeschooling community:

One of the common fears about homeschooling is that homeschoolers will – by the very nature of homeschooling – raise weird kids. I’ve always thought this was one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard. I mean, I went to private school until 8th grade and there were weird kids there. Then I went to public high school in a very hip and affluent school district and guess what? There were weird kids there, too. Then I went to college, grad school and med school and – you guessed it – weird people were enrolled in all of these. Med school, in particular, was geekville (it just doesn’t seem to attract a lot of ex-cheerleaders or prom queens, although there are a few).

I say that the primary determinant of weirdness is parents. Weird parents tend to produce weird kids and cool parents generally produce cool kids (however you want to define each…the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and so on). While it is not always the case, it is indeed often so.

So, I deduced, the same would also be true in the homeschooling community – there would be a balance of weird, less weird and more typically cool, just like there is anywhere else.

But I am wrong. Astonishingly wrong.

Granted, I am told that only 3 percent of all California homeschoolers (currently counted as 166,000) are members of the California Homeschool Network (join already, people!), and not all of those attended the conference. Still, it might be safe to assume that the conference would hold a representative sample of homeschoolers in general, since in attendance was everyone from the right-wing super conservative Holy Roller homeschoolers to the anything-goes types.

One person, who shall remain nameless, had this to say about the group aesthetics:

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many unattractive people gathered together in one place.”

Ouch.

I have heard many homeschoolers talk about how they don’t want their children to be bullied or how they never fit in during school, and I can’t help but think that this is why many of them are homeschooling. While I agree that school sucks, the social parts were what always kept me going. Socially, I loved school. It was the academics (boring, often irrelevant and very arbitrary), the teachers (lame with a few notable exceptions) and the bureaucracy (wasteful, useless, coercive, controlling) that I had issues with. Socially, I thought it was a blast.

I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world…

(Did you know Mattel sued over that song?).

But really, many of the conference attendees seemed to have just given up when it comes to appearances. I saw coke-bottle glasses that looked as if the wearers went into the eyeglass store and said, “I want the most unattractive glasses you have, and not the kind that are intentionally ugly to make a fashion statement,” as well as hair that just grows – no cuts, no style and certainly no color. No shampoo for the frizziest of menopausal hair.

That’s all good and fine. I’m all for letting go of our shallower selves, but I can’t wonder how much of the appearances were self-esteem issues and how much of them had tortured social lives during their childhoods that are motivating them to homeschool.

Like, I just wanna misfit in!

So that’s my take on the weird factor. To combat it, I’m going to sign my daughter up for cheerleading camp next week. (kidding)

As for the actual conference, on day 1, we tried to get there for the first session, but missed it, so my first session was “Fearless Homeschooling” led by Tammy Takahashi, who has this Website. I had all three kids and no real backup at this point, so I actually heard very little of what she said and had to bail out early. My friend stayed and took notes. Homeschooling is scary…jump in, and so on.

Then we decided we’d trade off for the rest of the day. There were so many things to choose from, it was tough. The next session I attended was by a homeschooling ER doctor who talked about ADHD diagnoses and whether a child has ADHD or is a kinesthetic learner. I worry about my little boy in this regard, because he is EXTREMELY active…like if I throw him in a group of 40 other 2- to 4-year-old boys, he will be the most active – by far. However, he’s also far ahead of the bell curve on every developmental milestone and can concentrate for long periods of time.

Well, I gained pounds of reassurance from this physician as well as several tips to help keep me sane and be of assistance to my little ball of energy.

During the next session, I babysat the five-under-5 while my friend hopped around the sessions and then we all got in the FOOD LINE FROM HELL and had the strangest veggie burgers ever followed by an ice cream sundae line, which (JOY!) included soy ice cream. That night, I took the five-under-5 to a bedtime story with Jim Weiss while my friend session-hopped again. Jim is a professional storyteller and I dropped some serious cash on his CDs before the conference ended. I highly recommend you check him out for books on CD. He categorizes them by age…preschool up to adult. He’s super entertaining.

That was it for Friday. The brain surgeon was operating very late, so slept at home, and my mother blew into town around bedtime. I read the middle third of the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia (since we left the Harry Potter book we were reading at our friends’ house) to my babes in bed and we all crashed.

Here are five things I’m grateful for today:

1. I’m grateful that my children constantly spill things on the floor, because it helps me keep the floors spic and span.
2. I’m grateful for all the people who put together the CHN 2008 Expo and volunteered their time, allowing us to have an amazing weekend.
3. I’m grateful for my husband, who had the same boyish energy my darling little boy has – and is a shining example of how that excess energy can be channeled.
4. I’m grateful for our little home, because there is less for me to clean and it’s easier to keep track of all the little ones.
5. I’m grateful for my parents (all of them), because they are so incredibly supportive and wonderful.

That’s all for now. More about day 2 (along with more astonishing and shallow revelations) tomorrow.

Toodles!