Homeschooling In and Out of Our League

I want to talk a little more about my decision to fundraise for the Tampa Bay HEAT.

My decision is based on something bigger than the gratitude I feel for this organization.  I am fundraising for the HEAT’s dream of a full service school building because I see a tremendous need for it.

As I have encountered various homeschool groups in the last two years, I have noticed a pattern.  Each group tends to have a particular focus: academics, informal fellowship, or sports.  Of course, these goals overlap, but most groups give priority to one category over the others.

Without question, the hardest need to satisfy when homeschooling is participation in team sports.  “Tebow” laws are great but not a complete answer to the question of how we provide team sports to the homeschooling community at large.

Groups like the HEAT provide these needed team sports.  They have popped up all over the country.  Here are just a few examples:  Richmond VA, Knoxville TN, Lakeshore WI, Albuquerque NM, and West Michigan.

I don’t know how every group finds space for practice and home games.  I don’t know which ones have an easy time finding the space, and which ones have a hard of it.

Except the HEAT.  I know they have a hard time.  A huge chunk of their efforts and money goes to finding and renting practice space, and then finding and scheduling games against local private schools.  Their need for a gymnasium and sports field is as obvious a wart on a prom queen’s nose.

I’ve also seen how an effort like the HEAT draws so many other incidental programs:  academic classes, special interest clubs, field trips and social gatherings.

I couldn’t help but imagine how easy and wonderful it would be if they could do all these things under one roof.  A homeschool building.

When I mentioned this to the HEAT’s founder, Teresa Manganello . . . well.  It turns out I was preaching to the choir.

It also turns out that at least one homeschool community has already turned this vision into reality:  The Homeschool Building.  The facility in Wyoming, Michigan, is a great example of how a thriving homeschool community can come together under one roof.  Their school facility provides for the needs of the homeschooling community without assuming responsibility for the academic curricula.

A homeschool basketball association near Wyoming, Michigan, explains the importance of a physical school facility:

“As home schoolers, we are truly blessed to live in one of the best places in the world to educate our children as we see fit. One huge factor in that assessment is our access to the Home School Building. Through the years, the HSB [Home School Building] has hosted tutoring classes, soccer practices, volleyball games marching band, orchestras and, of course, basketball games and practices. It is difficult to imagine how different the WMHSAA basketball league would be without the HSB for meetings, practices and games.”

Did you catch that?  Folks have a hard time imagining how their homeschool sports league could have blossomed without the support of a homeschool-run school building.

It’s funny; we homeschoolers escaped brick-and-mortar schools in the best interests of our children.  Now, it turns out that brick-and-mortar buildings may be the best bet for homeschooling’s future.

P.S. Please consider donating a purely symbolic amount to the Tampa Bay HEAT building fund, here: 
http://www.youcaring.com/nonprofits/tampa-bay-heat-mustard-seed-dream-fund/64690
  So far my pledge to match up to $500 total of donations from my readers has elicited only one small donation.  Help me out here, guys, could you?  Just put in the comments that you donated as a No One Of Any Import reader, and I’ll match it up to a $500 total.

Helping Those Who Have Helped Me

In today’s culture, it’s easy to feel isolated.  We send kids to school, go to work or otherwise busy ourselves, then come home and spend time inside our four walls until we go to bed.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

The fact that you work, send kids to school, and/or attend church provides an automatic sense of community.  It’s good to belong, but sometimes these connections are shallow.  Sometimes, only a few folks from these de facto communities are real friends, and the rest are strangers who seem nice but remain nothing more than awkward encounters during which you are mostly trying to remember their names and which kids belong to them.

When you have relocated your family three times in the last four years, the tendency to feel isolated increases.  Every time you land somewhere new, you are on your own until you take the steps needed to create relationships and a sense of community.

Once I decided to homeschool the boys, my feelings of isolation increased further.  How do you create relationships without an underlying school system? How can your children play outside when there are rarely children outside to play with?

The answers were already waiting for me:  Seven Mountains.  Brandon Homeschool Fellowship.  The Tampa Bay HEAT.

I doubt that any of these groups anticipated the needs of a family new to the area.  Yet, they were there for us.  How can I explain the blessing of merely showing up, paying a fee, and signing on the dotted line for classes, sports, and fellowship?

It’s like an oasis in the desert.

These groups are not the typical gaggle of Strangers Utilizing a Shared System.  They are bound together by a shared passion:  raising and educating their children in a wholly individualized manner.  As Christians, their focus is openly Christ-centered, but they don’t try to push religion on you.  They just welcome you.  My throat tightens every time I try to verbally express my gratitude for the community that they have created.

Now, I have a chance to express my gratitude a better way.

I can help the Tampa Bay HEAT.

HEAT started only three years ago, with four families.  Membership is now over 300 families.  This year, the HEAT couldn’t even hold their open house in their current location.  They had to rent space from a church instead.

They need a bigger building.

So, I helped convince them to start a new building fund.  And they did.

Gulp.

Now I want to put my money where my mouth is.  Or, more accurately, my husband’s money where my mouth is.  If my readers donate to the HEAT’s Mustard Seed Fund, I will match their donations, up to $500 total.

It’s a win-win situation.  Either I raise very little and thus save a lot of money, or I raise a lot and manage to bless a homeschool group that has already blessed me.

If you donate, please comment on the fundraising page that you are donating as a No One Of Any Import reader.  If you prefer, comment directly on this post about the amount that you donated.

MEH I am having technical difficulties with embedding the donation widget here on my site. So for now all I can offer is a link.  Please let me know either on that site or here if you have donated as a No One Of Any Import reader.

Thank you.

(HEAT is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so donations are tax deductible.)

Band-aids and Teddy Bears

Like ripping off a band-aid, the day my husband leaves for deployment is painful but a relief.  Instead of dreading, we get to anticipate:  six months and counting down.

The last time I thought I would post less while he was gone, which was silly in retrospect.  No predictions this time.  For now, I’m just going to enjoy the transition from preparing for deployment to enduring it.  Instead of the OCD-fueled race to Get Everything Fixed, Renewed, In Order, and Generally Done (which is never successful, by the way), there is the low-key filling of the days with Whatever Gets Us By.

Fast food for lunch? Cereal for dinner? Staying up later? Impulse shopping? Sure, what the heck. The family’s not complete when he’s gone, but for a little while at least the boys can have an easy-going mother.  Something I’m not always known to be.

Wish us luck on how long the mellow disposition lasts.

And yes, of course Lucky Bear is going too.

Individuals Used To Matter

We old-fashioned types are pretty shocked when we hear crazy collectivist talk spewing out of what is at least in theory a mainstream media outlet.  We shake our heads and shake our fists and cry out in despair and confusion, “What the hell is going on here? What is wrong with you people?”

It’s hard.  It’s hard to understand what has happened to our country.  How have we managed to elect and reelect a man demonstrably uncomfortable with the constraints of our Constitution?  How have we devolved from the land of opportunity to the land of entitlement?

The scary results before us now are the fruition of many years of individual abdication.  We, as individuals, keep relinquishing our responsibilities.  Young adults wandering the streets today are the grandchildren of a culture that demands both rights and blamelessness.

Nobody wants to take responsibility anymore.  We could list examples all day long, but that doesn’t really help us to understand how we got here.

The devil’s in the details.

Even the smallest decision can resonate far beyond its initial design.

Older son learned to read early.  We naively expected schools to take this skill into account, but by the final year of his brick-and-mortar experience, we knew that would never happen.  In third grade, the slow and thorough application of “reading strategies” to standardized (and therefore lame) material was not only the norm but mandatory, regardless of a child’s reading level.

They have to go through this process, I was told.  Even if they can mechanically read the words, they won’t be able to comprehend the meaning unless we use these strategies to teach them, I was told by Educators Who Are Well Meaning But Shall Remain Nameless.

I might have bought this premise, too, were it not for my own experience.  I was a child once, and a good reader.  My 1st grade teacher noticed.  She told me one day, go to the 2nd grade classroom during reading time.

While my classmates recited aloud the latest 1st grade adventures of Dick and Jane, I went upstairs and into a strange 2nd grade classroom.  The teacher there informed me that her class was at P.E., and I was to read all the “readers” at my own pace.  The shelf of readers extended the length of one wall.

No one ever asked me to apply a reading strategy.  No one ascertained whether I was really reading, or just messing about and taking advantage of the situation.  By the end of the year, I had ingested every reader shelved on that wall.

Fast forward thirty years.  I proposed the same arrangement to a very kind and capable teacher, and she looked at me as if lobsters were coming out of my ears.  You can’t do that, she protested.  The schedule won’t allow it.

Right.  The schedule won’t allow it.

In other words, its not her responsibility.

Thirty years ago, an underpaid urban public school teacher didn’t think twice about taking responsibility for the needs of an early reading student.  The arrangement was probably concocted in the teacher’s lounge.  They probably didn’t even run the idea by the principal first.

Did this arrangement substantially improve my education?

I don’t know.

It sure feels significant, though.  It sure feels like proof that the individual used to matter.

But not anymore.

Bob Gets Her Own Post

. . . and I get a really easy way to sneak another post in!

Thank you Bob for putting these thoughts into words for me:

Here’s the thing: Home schoolers don’t have to act “better than thou” for people to get defensive with us; just our existence makes some people uncomfortable. By “some people” I mean other parents who are painfully aware of just how awful the public schools are, but put their kids in them anyway, because after all, they’re free (“free” in the sense that we’ve already paid for them with our obscenely high property taxes), and if you didn’t send your kids there, you’d either have to spend a ton of money or a ton of time that you would prefer to spend on other things

In my experience, some parents are a lot happier if they can tell themselves that they really don’t have any choice in the matter, because after all kids have to go to school, and this is what’s available, so we’ll just send them there and hope for the best. It makes some of them very uncomfortable when they see home schoolers refusing to go along to get along; it shoots to pieces their theory that they don’t have any choice in the matter.

You’ve hit the nail on the head, Bob.  When acquaintances first learn that we homeschool, the response is often defensive.   Not in a mean, hostile way.  Not judging us.  More like, defending themselves against being judged.  “I could never do that” is a phrase I’ve mentioned hearing a lot, for a varying number of reasons, some quite valid of course.

Our mere existence is enough to make some feel uncomfortable.  And when folks are uncomfortable around me, that makes me uncomfortable.  Without realizing it, those experiences have made me more reticent about discussing homeschooling, even on my own blog.

I can be a bit silly about avoiding confrontation.

Happy Friday everyone!