Welcome! / Introductions

[Michael]

Hi Kathy ( back at ya). There are a few members here that are homeschooling in Australia. I'm not sure whether they reside in your neck of the woods, but anyway...

[RiceballMommy]

Hi, I'm Jess and I've just started homeschooling my 4 year old daughter. We currently live in Maryland (United States) and we'll be moving to Florida in the next few years. I've spent a good bit of time looking for a non-religious message board/support group. Especially one that is not on Yahoo (I don't want a yahoo account). It seems like the main message boards and groups for my state are for Christian homeschoolers.

[Michael]

Welcome Jess! This site has been running for about a year and a half now, and the discussion forum is active in spurts. I expect it will take a little while for it to start humming, but stick around and don't hesitate if you have questions. Have you explored these support groups? I didn't click through, though half the ones for Maryland look like Yahoo groups.

[rasprof]

Hi there- I am new here. I have considered homeschooling for almost 10 years now. Put my older sons (now 20 and 18) through the public school system and it was miserable. It's a very long story. However, now my 9 year old is having "issues" (teacher insulting him, accusing him of things) just like my older boys did and I can see it's the beginning of "the end." I will pull him out within the week. I live in Washington State, but in a very conservative town. There are no atheists around here that I know of, but I do have 2 good friends who are not religious... they don't consider themselves atheists or agnostics... and they are homeschooling their kids, so I will have some support in them. I am enjoying reading all of the posts here. What a refreshing place to go to for info and support. I'm glad I found you!

[Michael]

Hi rasprof, perhaps there are lots of atheists around, but they are keeping a low profile (or acting religious out of peer pressure / a desire to fit in)?

[Pamla]

Thanks for the Forum!
This is a breath of fresh air!
I'm homeschooling my 11 yo daughter and 10 yo son. We've always homeschooled. That seemed the best choice when my daughter started reading at age 2. The past 4.5 years we've been near Montgomery, AL. During our time in the heart of the Bible Belt, I have met only staunchly Christian Conservative families - homeschooling and otherwise! Yikes! For the past few years we've gone to churches just so my kids could spend time with their friends. It is excruciating to be in opposition to the fundamental beliefs of EVERY (homeschooling) family we've met in the past 5 years. I'm actually getting tired of being ; so, since I'm recently single again and have no family in the continental US, I've been searching for a new place to call home. Any freethinking homeschoolers near Cleveland, OH

Happy New Year!
-Pam

[Michael]

Hi Pam, you're welcome! I hear you re: "best choice". My eldest son was in a half-day Montessori program when he was 3-4, and his teacher told me she wished she had more time to spend with him, because she couldn't keep up with him! It made me think twice about continuing formal schooling, and we've been homeschooling since. It would be difficult to put him back in school now, even if I wanted to (which I don't).

[KathyO]

Is this the spot for introductions? My name is Kathy, and I've been an atheist most of my life (since the age of 8 or 9) and a homeschooler for all of my child's life. We're into the high school years now, and still going strong. Dh and I are both biologists by training, so we spend a lot of time at museums, which are mostly appreciated. I just started a science blog of my own that focuses on new findings and developments.

[elderwanda]

Hello everyone,

I've been lurking around this website, and finding a lot of interesting stuff. I am going to be homeschooling my oldest son next year. He's 12, "Gifted/Asperger's/ADD", and failing every subject in school.

Our reason for homeschooling is mostly because the public school system isn't meeting his needs. They are trying, and they've been relatively good about following the law and trying to meet his needs, but it just isn't working. He's such a neat kid, with so much potential, but he's slipping through the cracks more and more each year.

The more I read about homeschooling, the more excited I get about our options. And nervous, too. I'm worried that my kid is going to be the one kid for whom homeschooling just doesn't work. (He's the exception to every other rule, so why not that one?)

I searched high and low to find a forum and website that is actually devoted to homeschoolers with similar views as myself. I go to another hsing board sometimes, which has more traffic, and although I enjoy being there, it's sometimes a bit disappointing when everyone else is talking about which bible verse their kids are learning for "science."


I notice there is very little activity here, though. Would I be seeing a lot more if I were on Facebook? I'm fairly determined to go to my grave without ever having to sign up for Facebook, or any of that stuff, but there seems to be a lot of Freethinkers stuff that can only be accessed that way. I'd almost rather saw off my nose with a butter knife than join Facebook, but maybe I'll have to re-think. Hmmm?

Well, it's nice to be here. I hope more people start posting.

[Michael]

Hi elderwanda,

glad you came out of lurkdom! I'm still a newbie at homeschooling (my eldest is seven), but it sounds like you are doing the right thing. There are a lot of options and different approaches (e.g. from highly structured / parent-led to informal / child-led), and you may need to experiment a bit to find what works for your son. I often read people recommending a cooling-off period of x months between school and starting anything serious. We're kind of eclectic /child-led so far in this house, so we're cooling off indefinitely.

For sure, it would be nice to see more people posting. I'm finding it isn't easy getting a forum like this off the ground. Due to the nature of this format, there really needs to be a critical mass of active members posting regularly for it to be successful. It's human nature really. What has been happening is that new members join, and are active for awhile, but they soon get discouraged by the level of activity and tend not to return. We need to get a bunch of people here and active at the same time so that it doesn't feel like a ghost town.

The Facebook group is more active, but I wouldn't advise you to join Facebook for it necessarily. It's a different format, and personally I prefer forums for real support and discussion. Facebook is a little too cold IMO - it's more conducive to short messages and sharing links to news and resources, though for some reason it doesn't feel like a real community to me. Facebook groups have inherent flaws as well. People are not notified of new posts to groups, so what happens is people tend to join and forget about them. There are 850 people on the group at the moment. It would be great to see some of those folks join up here and participate. Eventually, the people who build this forum software will add a feature to allow people to log-in here using their Facebook name/password and that would make it easier for them to do so. By the way, you don't need to join Facebook to check out the group. Here's a link to the group (there's a wall where people post short stuff, and a discussion area for threads on various topics).

Anyway, I'll see what I can do about promoting the forums. Some company would be nice, yes?