Kathleen started high school this year. It's crazy to have a child in high school, as I clearly remember my own time in high school. Even crazier was realizing that Kathleen, who is four years away from starting college, is five times closer to her freshman year than I am, who started at BYU twenty years ago. I guess this is how getting old happens - you're young until suddenly it's someone else's turn to be young.
Whenever I've had conversations about homeschooling, high school is always brought up. "But what will you do about high school?" the person will ask, "Won't you send her to traditional school then?" I had thought that perhaps we would consider sending Kathleen in for a few classes that were more hands on or instructor dependent, like science or math. This year, ironically, that decision was taken out of our hands, as nobody here is attending school in person anyway. So it's a moot point.
We hadn't really considered it anyway, however, as I've found an online academy - The Well-Trained Mind Academy - that offers individual online classes that follows along with the curriculum and learning philosophy that we've been using since Kathleen started kindergarten.
When I started thinking about how Kathleen would do high school last year, I considered several options. BYU offers an online high school that I looked in to, but I've heard from a friend who uses them that the instructors are not understanding about time differences, going so far as making students take exams at two in the morning. We are twelve hours ahead of Utah, so that was not going to work very well.
Also, I didn't like the classes offered. The Well-Trained Mind is a classical curriculum that is built on four-year cycles that are repeated three times, with the culmination being in high school when the real in-depth learning happens. BYU high school doesn't follow that cycle and so Kathleen wasn't going to get the final, most important cycle.
We also considered having her doing some classes as independent study through BYU University. We plan on encouraging all our children to attend a Church of Jesus Christ school for a variety of reasons (one of them being financial), so it made sense to start getting credits now instead of taking AP tests for college credit. That option isn't off the table, but we decided that freshman year might be a little early to start college level classes.
So instead Kathleen is taking almost all of her classes through the Well-Trained Mind academy. I'm busy with the smaller children who need in-person, hands-on instruction, so I decided it was better to have Kathleen learn from teachers who are paid to deliver in-depth high-quality education. They were going to be more stringent than me, more thorough than me, and more knowledgable than me. Also, it is good for her to get used to having to perform to someone else's standards and get used to doing things according to a deadline. I knew that I would be inclined to be lazy with her education, and didn't want her to suffer for my laziness.
She is also doing seminary online, through an expat class that is based in England. I had hoped that there would be a weekly online live class, but it isn't set up that way, instead being self-study. If we are overseas next year, I will find a US-based class that has live classes that she can attend a day or two per week. And with the time difference, it won't even be held in the early morning. Seminary is much better with other people.
Kathleen's favorite part of high school is getting to ride twice a week instead of once a week like the rest of her siblings. Horseback riding is her after-school sport, so we decided that she could practice twice a week. I don't like a lot of time commitments so we're keeping it to twice a week, but she's happy for the change. I already ride twice a week, so we'll have some mother-daughter bonding time.
I feel somewhat sad that she won't have the typical fun high school experiences that I had in my high school days, but I'm also glad that she won't have to deal with so much of the negative ones that happen along with the good ones. When she laments the lack of constant social interaction, I remind her that in four years she will get to begin college and be around peers all day, every day. I know that there is no perfect option for schooling, and we are all happy with the one that we have chosen, despite its downsides. Selfishly, I know that she will be gone in four years, and I want to keep her close while I can.
So that's high school this year. I'll let you know next year how it has turned out.
