Homeschool Your Teenager

There are a lot of advantages to homeschooling your teenager.

The most important is they are around people (mostly you) with your values most of the time while there friends in school may not be. A learning environment that encompasses your values is priceless. Teens are an easily influenced group, and you want the influences to be what you define as good.

Another big advantage is your teen will become more mature and self-sufficient in learning and in life skills because he or she is around adults much more than teens who attend traditional school. At home, part of your teen's learning can and should include life skills like cooking, laundry, grocery shopping, budgeting, chores, sorting and organizing, and a feeling of family team work by working together with you to accomplish tasks the family needs done to function.

A homeschooled teen can hold a job and work more hours than a teen in traditional school. It takes a lot less time during the day to teach a few students than a classroom full of students. School work tasks and projects can be spread out to make the schedule flexible so your teen can work when traditionally-schooled teens can't.

You can continue school all year long. I like to use a little more traditional curriculum during the regular school year and do extra reading and special projects during the summer. This year, my son's project is to learn Visual Basic and use it to develop a computer game. He is also taking the Thirty Day Challenge free online marketing course to learn about market research, niche research and how to use a wide variety of web-based tools to market his product. The goal isn't to make money this year. The goal is to learn about all the tools the web has to offer and how much easier they make your life when you use them to your best advantage.

Right now, he's deciding whether he's going to have to do a complete system wipe or if he can repair Windows on his machine. That stuff is way beyond me. When I need that done I take the computer to the shop. He learned that on his own and surely wouldn't have learned it in school until much later in life.

As the primary learning facilitator, you get to say "look it up" whenever they ask a question they are capable of learning on their own. This demands more independence from them. After awhile it gets to the point that they will only ask you questions on what you are specifically teaching them, or when they can't find the information they need after some serious work on their own.

The questions I get now are more along the lines of which search terms I would try first out of a list and would I please pick up books on some subject the next time I tutor at the library. Today I brought home two books on beginning Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications.

In homeschooling, learning is a much more active and hands-on process. My son learns faster and with better retention and comprehension. As we all know from the world of work, you learn by doing with on-the-job training. Homeschooling can be much more similar to the real world than school.

I'm finding the school system to be less in touch with the real world as each year passes. I tutor students who attend both public and private schools and I listen carefully to what my students say in passing. I don't pay much attention to teacher complaints because all kids will have a gripe about a teacher at some point during the school year. But some of what I hear is disturbing. One of my students told me her chemistry teacher said she hated chemistry and it was her worst science subject in school. The teacher had applied for a different science position than chemistry teacher. The school needed a chemistry teacher and put this teacher in the position. I find it sad that a science teacher can actually hate any science subject enough to say something like that. I also find it very unprofessional. I do not want my child taught by anyone who hates the subject he or she is teaching. How is a student supposed to grasp a love of learning if the teacher doesn't?

There is one warning I'll give you about homeschooling. You have to be interested enough in learning to want to teach your children. If you're not interested in learning, homeschooling will be a horrific chore rather than a new adventure each day.

Be sure to take your own learning abilities and desires into account when deciding to homeschool your teen yourself. If you want your teen to be homeschooled, but don't want to do it yourself, there are often at least a few local homeschools around that will accept 8-15 students per school year. It can cost more than the most expensive private school in town, but it may also be worth every penny you spend on it.

Homeschooling a teen may also entail advanced subjects you didn't study. You can learn them as you teach your child, or you can find a local group who can provide resources on those subjects, or you can hire a tutor to teach. Advanced subjects many parents don't want to tackle are physics, chemistry, algebra II, advanced math, biology, and English literature and composition. Many local homeschooling teens and tweens groups pool resources and provide a class on an advanced topic at a library or other inexpensive meeting place that has the facilities necessary. Get to know your local teen homeschool group and network with them. They will help you immensely in your homeschooling endeavors.