TESTIMONIAL

CONFESSIONS OF A HOME SCHOOLED COLLEGE STUDENT

by Emily Moriarty

Through home schooling I learned how to study on my own, to be self-motivated and to feel responsible for my own education. I have grown much stronger in my Faith and am very close to my family.

Home schooling is a method of education by which a student is taught at home by his parents. I was home schooled for a total of ten years: beginning in second grade and finishing in twelfth. Our family used various textbooks gathered from the curricula of private school book distributors, but textbooks were merely a tool for us. The world was our classroom, and our most important and memorable lessons were learned from our every day experiences with family, community, and the outdoors.

My parents withdrew me from the public school system in 1985 when I was in the second grade. Their reasons were mainly academic. I was a gifted student, and the public school in our small Iowa farm town did not know what to do with me. The school placed me in their gifted program and at the same time in a class with delinquent older kids. I was the youngest and the brightest in the group, and the others resented that. I became very stressed out and unhappy in school, grew run down, and contracted scarlet fever. My parents had heard of home schooling before this time but never considered it until I became ill. I began school at home the second semester of that year and loved it.

My mother was tentative about teaching at first but soon relaxed when she observed how I was thriving in the new environment. The first few years she was assisted in designing a curriculum by other home schoolers in the area. In addition to studying the usual subjects, our typical school day involved cooking for learning fractions, grocery shopping for economics, gardening for science, writing letters for English, Lego building for engineering, and mapping the neighborhood for map skills. My three younger siblings followed me into the world of home schooling over the next several years as my parents realized that it encouraged closer family life and positive moral development.

When I was nine, we moved to a university city, Lawrence, Kansas, where there were many other home schooling families. We all got together once a month at a local church for a group class and team games. We always looked forward to that day. The parents would take turns each month teaching about their favorite subjects. The home schoolers also planned parties, trips to places like museums or the state capital, and an annual spring field day. For socialization I played with my brothers and sister, with other home schoolers, and with public-school kids in the afternoons. Nearly everyone who found out my family home schooled asked if we were isolated socially. We were not isolated; we learned social skills through getting along with our siblings all day every day; we also made many friends through our numerous extracurricular activities. From age five I took piano lessons for my music class. For physical education I swam competitively for twelve years, played soccer on a community team, and competed in gymnastics.

Usually I finished all my book assignments by noon each day; in the afternoons my mom would send me to our neighborhood pond with binoculars, field guides, and "duck bread" for birdwatching, saying "go learn something." Some days the whole family would go to the public library for the afternoon and each person would research his or her favorite topic. Once for a field trip our family went to Montana for two weeks, on the way studying the different cloud types, biomes, geological formations, animals, and plants and visiting museums, parks, and historical monuments. Everything was a learning experience for us. Sometimes my mom would drop us off with a lunch at a nearby wetland for the day. For fun my brothers and I mapped the entire area. The university that owns this wetland now uses a version of this map on its displays. Another time I bought a field guide to trees, and for science class one day I identified the fifty-plus trees in our backyard. After school, with our neighbor kids we organized clubs, planned football games, basketball demonstrations, haunted houses, puppet shows, and exploration trips. We home schoolers never got bored; we rarely watched television but invented our own entertainment.

When I reached high school age, my mother and I decided that some classes, such as Latin and upper-level math, were beyond her teaching abilities. In tenth grade, I enrolled in a public school full-time to take these classes and also to compete on the high school swimming team (the school excluded all students who took less than five hours of classes each day). I did not like public school much at all. Most of the students cursed continually, the social atmosphere was unfriendly, and everyone belonged to his own clique. I stayed in public school that year to finish the swimming season, but the next year I only enrolled three hours per day for necessary classes: Latin II, pre-calculus, and chemistry. In junior high and throughout high school I shared a tutor, a former college teacher, with several other home schoolers for grammar, composition, and literature. My schedule was to attend school in the morning, come home before lunch, go to an extracurricular activity in the afternoon, and do homework and other things in the evening. I had a similar schedule in twelfth grade when I took Latin Literature, advanced biology, and Calculus I and II. The best thing about the public high school was that I had excellent teachers for every class during my three years there; many were the spouses of professors at the University of Kansas. When I attended, the public school system allowed home schoolers to enroll part time; for our classes we were given a grade, grade-point average, and credit. The year following my graduation, the policy was changed to not allow home schoolers credit towards graduation. In other words, students from then on had to go to school full-time to receive a diploma.

What did I do in the free time that all home schoolers have because they do not spend six hours every day in classes? I spent long afternoons observing and writing about the water life at our neighborhood pond; I studied the fifty or more species of birds that visited our area; I landscaped our yard with flower gardens; I checked out every book in the library on birds, pond life, plants, gardening, and photography. About this time I became really interested in reptiles and amphibians. There were many frogs and turtles in our pond; I learned how to catch turtles with a fishing net when they were basking in the sun and how to capture frogs at night while they were calling. When I was fourteen years old, I began a study of the population of painted turtles at the pond; I measured the shell length and width, verified the sex, weighed, marked, released, and later recaptured the turtles to determine their growth rate. I did this every spring and summer until, as a senior in high school, I wrote up all the data for a biology class research paper, state science academy presentation, and a national science contest. I also volunteered at a wild animal rehabilitation center for three years, was involved with the Kansas Herpetological (reptiles and amphibians) Society, Biology Club, Latin Club, and piano camps, did volunteer work at the KU Natural History Museum, swam competitively year-round, was assistant teacher in a private school, and helped found a Catholic youth group. Home schooling taught me to be creative, to wonder at the world, to be interested in all kinds of things. In a public school, a student's enthusiasm is squelched; he is required to memorize a set amount of information to pass a class. Home schooling helped me discover my interests and develop them towards an occupation someday.

Presently, I am a freshman attending Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. The first semester I took twenty credit hours (including a senior level biology course which required a written thesis), took piano lessons, worked ten hours each week, and played on the school's soccer team. My grade point average for the semester was 3.93. College classes are similar to home school because the student goes to class for a few hours each day but spends most of his time studying independently. I did not find the transition from home schooling to college very difficult. I am currently working on two research projects on amphibians: one a study of salamanders using electron microscopy, the other a molecular (DNA) comparison of two species of frogs. The frog project I began last spring, when I would go to the Natural History Museum to do work in the molecular lab after my morning classes at the high school. In my free time now, after classes and homework, my friends and I go to plays, shows, concerts, Notre Dame games, club meetings, and rosaries.

Through home schooling I learned how to study on my own, to be self-motivated and to feel responsible for my own education. I have grown much stronger in my Faith and am very close to my family. Over the years my parents wondered whether home schooling was the best form of education for their children. They no longer have any doubts. Not only did we receive a superior education, but we also developed our creativity through having the freedom to explore our talents and the time to pursue them, our intellects through constant challenge, and our morals through experience with our community and especially our family.

Emily Moriarty is a freshman at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana.