[davidw]

Our two children are homeschooled. My eldest (five) is almost done with Kindergarten. She got an early start (learning to count to ten at eighteen months and knew her ABCs at twenty months). My three-year-old son isn't in Kindergarten yet he participated in most everything she did and is doing most everything successfully.

There are two or three social groups for homeschooled children here in which my children participate in that they go to once a week. One of these my son was originally placed in a three-year-old curriculum that he was bored in. A week later he was bumped up to the four-year-old curriculum of which he excelled in but was still somewhat bored. He soaks this up like his sister (like a sponge) - and wants to do more.

They are both very intelligent and we are looking forward to what comes next. I was surprised a few weeks ago when my daughter invented her first blueprint of a Rube Goldberg contraption (a mouse trap, coincidentally). She drew it on paper and explained exactly how it worked. She has been writing sheet music (although I don't think she fully understands what she is doing) for about six months now. This started when we gave her a toy piano with a song on it. We've seen so much out of both of them since we started homeschooling.

I hated public school
- I couldn't learn
- I felt like I was being held back (although I stayed in my correct grade levels)
- I had learning difficulties that teachers did not accept nor were willing to help me with.
- I was frustrated due to oversized class settings (until I moved my senior year; my class size dropped from 450 to 17)
- I was bored (even moving to honors classes for advanced learning was boring - I wanted to learn, not read more stories as in English (we were already reading stories)).

I want to give my children the opportunity to learn at their pace and not be held back. I also want to give them an unbiased education (When my wife and I went to school, we both were faced with one-sided discussions about most everything. It was the secular/public school way or we were graded wrong - told we were wrong. I want to allow my children to learn everything, whether right or wrong, so that they can understand. I want them to learn both sides to every argument because when they get out in the real world, they are going to be faced with bias, hate, one-sidedness, etc., and without the knowledge, they will be lost and accept possible fiction as fact.

I'm not against the public school system - I think it has great potential. I don't think that the public school system where we live is adequate for educating my children. I would rather them go where I learned in the Netherlands or the school that I graduated from (which was forcefully shut down in 1994 due to consolidation - some of my classes had a 1:4 teacher to student ratio such as my trigonometry class - but it was an excellent learning environment). In my previous high school where classes were a 1:35 to 1:40 ratio depending on who was there, no education was present; I would come in, the teacher gave the assignment, and the rest of the class was fulfilling the assignment. Nothing was learned.

There are negative things that I can address about what the public school system locally has said in regards to my children being homeschooled as since they aren't in school, they lose those extra dollars - since it is a business to them, but I will leave that out.