Published: February 23, 2008 11:10 pm            

Homeschooling: Education not confined to school walls

Parents taking education into their own hands

Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series chronicling the experiences of Madison County homeschooled students. Monday’s stories will focus on the students perspective and sports.



Religion.

Individualized instruction.

Family atmosphere.

Protection from dangers in school.

A love of learning.

These are just a few of the many reasons more and more parents are deciding to put their children’s education into their own hands through homeschooling.

For Brian Bertucci of Berea, the experience of teaching middle school English for a year in a private Catholic school in Florida led to his decision to home school his 6-year-old son Mark.

The reality is that classroom management was the real lesson he was teaching, Bertucci said.

“The subject matter I was teaching was almost auxiliary,” he said. “With the amount of time it takes 25 middle-schoolers to sit down and get quiet, then they forgot their book, then every five minutes someone has to use the bathroom, you’ve got about 15 minutes of core education time there to present your material. You’ve got about seven minutes available to you where you can interact with students.

“You break that down with 20 or 30 students, you’re talking about 15 or 20 seconds of interaction with a student per day,” Bertucci said. “It’s very difficult to understand anything about that kid, what’s happening in his home life and what his interests are.”

It is the system and not the teachers who are to blame, he said.

“Almost to a fault, people today working in school systems are altruistic souls who take huge pay cuts and huge slices of their personal life and devote it because they want to help future generations,” Bertucci said. “I have total respect for teachers. Ninety percent of them are there for the right reasons.

“But, the system itself is flawed,” he said. “Why do schools teach the way they do? Why do they teach in eight 45-minute blocks segmented by clocks? Why do kids get grouped together in age-segregated groups? Why do we grade them with standardized tests?”

‘Disillusioned’

Berean Lisa Roush, who home schools her four children — 9-year-old Joey, 7-year-old Carli, 6-year-old Jordan and 4-year-old Benjamin — also taught in a Maryland high school before determining that homeschooling was the best route for her family.

“I had a fine time in public school, and, then, I taught in public school,” she said. “I taught high school for four years and was really disillusioned by what seemed like a lot of the expectations and demands put on teachers. They have to teach this huge number of students and try to get everybody along at the same pace. I hadn’t really thought about homeschooling. It seemed really daunting and intimidating.”

“We wanted to give them an excellent education with a Christian world view,” Roush said. “We wanted them to understand that learning just doesn’t happen during the traditional school day and that learning is something that can happen any hour of the day. It doesn’t take place necessarily in textbooks or in a classroom setting. There’s learning through service, learning through giving, learning through reading and learning through experimenting.”

An average day of learning includes family worship, Bible study, lessons in Latin, grammar, spelling, math, history and outdoor activities on the family’s 12-acre farm.

An upcoming trip to Mammoth Cave is planned to coincide with the children’s study of Paleo-Indians.

While admitting it is sometimes tiring and frustrating, Roush said the process has been exciting and a delight.

“It’s tremendously rewarding,” she said. “I’m in the process of teaching my third child how to read. It’s so amazing to watch those light bulbs come on. It’s awesome to be there to experience these things together and to not have the nightly headaches of seeing my kids from 3 to 8 p.m., and I’m barking at them to do their homework.”

“Every parent homeschools,” Roush said. “Some of them just do it more than others. People don’t always realize that when you have your little baby at home and you’re talking to them and teaching them rhymes and things like that, you’re homeschooling. It can just build from that. It doesn’t have to stop.”

‘Right thing for them’

Tracey Barracca of Richmond said homeschooling her three children — 8-year-old Amelia, 6-year-old Daniel and 3-year-old Olivia — is definitely not easy.

“It’s the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced in my life,” she said. “But, what keeps me going is believing that it’s the right thing for them for now. That helps me when the daily challenges come.”

“We felt like we could give them a high-quality education at home,” Barracca said. “We also wanted to have them in an environment where we could communicate our values to them in the process of educating them.”

The family starts every day by saying the Pledge of Allegiance and having Bible study before focusing on a variety of subjects for each child.

To help supplement their education and socialization, the kids also attend a homeschool cooperative once a week and are members of the 4-H Home School Club.

Amelia, Barracca’s oldest child, also is a member of a home school Girl Scouts troop that includes about eight families who meet twice a month.

“I think they’ll get just as good of an education,” she said. “I think they’ll be secure in our family and in their relationships with our family, which will help them be secure in the outside world.”

After being frustrated that more recess time was not allowed and watching her daughter stressed out from school, Jodie Leidecker chose to take her daughter, 13-year-old Lekey, out of Berea Community Schools after the fifth grade so she could homeschool her.

“It’s not like it was horrible to be at school for her,” she said. “She did like it at times. But, the difference in what she’s interested in and what she’s starting to pursue was almost like being reborn in a way.”

Leidecker also homeschools her 9-year-old daughter Anna, who, unlike her sister, has never attended a public or private school.

“I think you see a difference in the kids who have always been homeschooled,” she said. “They are so self-motivated. It’s a huge difference. Lekey was always waiting for someone to tell her what she should do.”

“I was very work ‘booky’ in the beginning,” Leidecker said about her teaching philosophy. “That’s the only model I had. Now, it’s different. They wanted to learn French, so we got a French CD set from the library. We listen to it and practice French.”

With the advantage of working from home, Richmond resident Yolande Jones and her husband are afforded ample time to instruct their children from home and oversee their learning experiences.

Although her 20-year-old son Andrew is now a sophomore at the University of Kentucky, Jones still homeschools her 9- and 15-year-old children.

“Traveling with my husband when he is on business allows me and the children to visit historic sites, museums and places of interest they otherwise would not be able to have if enrolled in school,” she said.

Through a child-directed method, Jones, a board member of the Kentucky Home Education Association, said she wants to provide her children with a love for learning.

“We provide our children with resources to help them learn naturally and holistically,” she said. “When they have a say in the topic of study they become excited about learning.”

“We focus on teaching our children to be thinkers, to question everything, research, learn, care about and be involved in their community, country and other parts of our world,” Jones said. “It has kept our relationship as parents with our children open and trusting. Our children feel comfortable interacting with any age group no matter how old or how young.”

Protecting kids

Before she even had kids, Kellie Silver of Richmond said she knew she wanted to homeschool her children.

The self-described “career homeschool mom,” homeschools her own three children — 14-year-old Katie, 12-year-old Joey and 9-year-old Amber — along with her 6-year-old nephew Trystan.

“I just felt like we could spend more time together and give them one-on-one attention with their education,” she said. “I felt like we could really cover everything that we needed to and get to spend that quality time together.”

“I feel like I can really protect the kids, too, from some of the things that go on in public schools,” Silver said.

She was introduced to homeschooling through other families, and liked what she saw.

“I could work a job, have a career of my own and make money,” Silver said. “This is totally volunteer. But, the reward is knowing what your children are learning, and, if they aren’t getting it, slowing the pace down, as opposed to going onto the next thing and never learning it.”

Exploratory learning

Margie Stelzer, who lives just outside of Richmond, has been learning with her kids — 12-year-old Spencer and 9-year-old Mary Rose — since they were born.

She started thinking about homeschooling when Spencer was 3 or 4 years old when they joined a cooperative where families came together to play and learn.

Enjoying the exploratory way of learning, Stelzer said she wanted the experience to continue once Spencer became school age.

“Many traditionally schooled high school graduates are unable to ponder a subject from many different angles, have lost the ability to think creatively and are unaware of how politics, mathematics and science are integrated into life,” she said. “It seems many college students choose career paths for the money that they may make or the employment opportunity it may give with little consideration of what they are deeply interested in or how they can best contribute to the larger society.

“They seem unaware of what their strengths and skills are outside of structured settings and how to engage life with interest and curiosity,” Stelzer said. “They seemed to be kids who have had the life and joy sucked out of them. We wanted something different for our kids.”

She admits that homeschools do have their fair share of critics.

People always ask if her kids’ socialization needs are being met, Stelzer said, and others say that homeschooling is too protective of an environment and that kids need to be out of the home more.

Most traditional education programs seem to create students who are prepared to complete tasks and to perform functions, but do not encourage children to consider why they are doing these tasks and functions, she said.

“To maintain order, schools encourage conformity of thought and action and discourage pondering the hows and whys of life,” Stelzer said.

“By zapping curiosity, providing few interesting role models, removing children from the daily life of the world, emphasizing achievement over self-reflection, and overall, boring children for long periods of time, schools have created adults who are searching for something to alleviate this overall dissatisfaction they have experienced for so much of their life,” she said. “There is so much talk about education reform, but I don’t think the kind of reformation needed can be done within our present-day school systems.”

        

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