Odd
Sometimes if you put a homeschooler next to a not-homeschooler the homeschooler comes off looking a little odd. Or at least that’s what I hear. So far I’ve never seen Noah look odd when he’s in a group of not-homeschooled kids (he’s the only homeschooler on his baseball team, for example, and in his religious school) although he is certainly odd at home often enough. Thing is, I’m pretty sure the other kids are probably secretly odd at home, too.
But I’ll agree that homeschoolers can look — but don’t always look — strange compared to their schooled peers and I think there are a couple of reasons for that:
- Homeschooled parents can be odd. It takes a certain amount of “buck the system” to homeschool and people who have that certain amount are more likely, in my experience, to have other eccentricities. You’ll find oddness everywhere, of course, but the homeschool community tends to embrace and even celebrate it.
- Homeschooled kids are generally less peer oriented, which makes sense because even the busiest, most scheduled homeschooler is still spending less time with his or her same age peers. Because of this, homeschoolers sometimes don’t have any idea whether or not their interests and activities are “cool” for their age. (Homeschoolers don’t often age segregate except in very general ways. Like Noah’s old Spanish class was for 5 to 9 year olds and his gym class is like this, too.) This is why you will sometimes see homeschoolers who are doing things that look too young or saying things that sound too old.
Personally I like peculiar people and as long as Noah is happy and comfortable with himself, I’m happy. Although it is nice to see that he has a good time with his schooled friends and in mostly schooled group and that they like him and accept him. You know, that he “passes” as typical despite his school experience being atypical.
I was thinking about this because I was thinking about a friend who said that s/he would never want to homeschool because the homeschooled kids s/he knows who eventually went to school seemed “weird.” And I was thinking that this is a chicken/egg thing because like I said, sometimes those kids would have been weird anyway because they have weird parents (and again, I like weird so I have no value judgment about this being a trifle peculiar myself) and that’s why the kids are homeschooling and then maybe homeschooling reinforces the weirdness because there is no one saying, “Dude, your hair looks stupid and nobody cares about carbon dating.” Or if someone is saying it, you can always find other people to say otherwise because you can put a call out on the homeschool list for carbon dating buddies and I guarantee that there will be someone out there about to form a group about it.
Now I won’t say that this hasn’t crossed my mind as a concern. Even though I like weird and even though I think weird kids often make the most interesting adults, I also want Noah to be liked and to feel good about himself and if he was showing up at baseball and being ignored or fielding hostility from the other kids I might feel really worried that keeping him at home was not helping matters any. Then again, if you’ve got a weird kid then maybe it would be kinder to keep him/her at home, right? Not to reenforce the weirdness, (which is something that some parents have mentioned as a concern, “How will s/he ever learn to fit in if we don’t send him/her to school?”) but to reenforce that weirdness is subjective and that there’s nothing wrong with being odd.
So while I’ll admit that it’s gratifying to see Noah mix it up with schooled friends and be fine, it’s also gratifying to see him so comfortable with his own peculiarities and interests and so unconcerned with how others might feel about it.
Of course I don’t know how much of this is Noah and how much of this is homeschooled Noah. He is delightfully indifferent about what other people think and about fitting in. He has his own ideas about what’s cool and what isn’t and so far he doesn’t care whether or not this fits in with the status quo. Like I said, I am not without weirdness myself and by the time I was Noah’s age I had a firm understanding of my weirdness only I was bewildered by other people’s concern with it. I liked myself and didn’t really understand why my choices made me stand out. (It wasn’t so much teasing — the only teasing I got was about reading so much and I was proud of reading so much — it was more that it was exhausting to try to figure out what I was doing that made me so left-of-center and trying to communicate with people — kids and teachers — who didn’t seem to quite get me.) Brett had a tougher time of it at this age although he was less overtly weird. He had migraines by fourth grade because he was so worried about pleasing people and fitting in.
I tend to use Brett and myself as a control group to figure out our choices and while I know that this isn’t really fair, it’s also all I’ve got. Noah is very similar to the both of us in temperment so even if it’s not accurate I can’t help but think about our experiences as I observe my son. And what I see is someone who isn’t as burdened as either of us were by 9 1/2. What I see is a child who not only likes himself but (and this is where I was missing something) assumes he is likeable. This is someone who assumes his interests are interesting even if his friend’s aren’t that interested. (”He likes this and I like that,” shrugs Noah. “We’re different that way.”)
I don’t know if he’ll seem weirder by fifteen or if he’ll be angry at us one day for not letting him go to school to learn how to “fit in” or if he were going to school that he’d be just as confident and comfortable with himself. I have no idea. It’s a mad experiment. But so far I can live with the results.
I went to school full-time from kindergarten on, and I was still plenty weird. I did atrocious thigns to my hair and dressed like a 40-year old schoolmarm from Little House on the Prairie days. I read Orwell from a young age and never got into Sweet Valley High. I was always obsessed with fantasy and sci fi. I plunged myself into crafts and research projects because they seemed like fun from well before middle school. Some kids are just like that. Being at school did not help me “fit in,” it just made it painfully obvious that I did not fit in (though eventually I was glad to learn that, and glad to be able to accept and celebrate it).
What helped me “fit in” was eventually my parents signing me up for modelling classes–yes! that’s right!–and then I was taught how to dress, do my hair and makeup, and walk like other girls my age. But I wouldn’t argue that this was a positive influence. It certainly made my social life less painful and I was much less lonely, but I felt almost like I had a split personality: the person I really was (who was in some ways unacceptable) and the person I was taught to present myself as. It’s a hard thing to get over. I’m not sure if it would have been better or worse not to have attended the classes.
…I think my point was supposed to be that kids are weird in any and all settings, and I’m sure homeschooling isn’t at fault. And that eventually he might fit in, or he might not, and you might be able to do something about it, and you might not, and either way might be a good or bad thing. It’s really hard to tell in advance, or even afterwards. I think “fitting in” is probably overemphasized for schoolkids. There’s a lot to be admired in *not* fitting in.
Dawn, I have a kid who is weird, and who is profoundly happy in school right now because she goes to an art high school where “everyone is weird.” (Her words.) She had a rough time in middle school because of her weirdness (two professor-parents: how weird is that?), but both elementary and high school (so far, knock wood) have tolerated and even embraced her weirdness. We really did consider homeschooling for middle school to protect her from the horrible teasing, etc. So I think (with my equally small sample to yours) that the weirdness precedes the homeschooling and the homeschooling is more protective than not. Your choices have been very different from mine, of course, but I am inspired by reading about yours.
I think homeschooled kids seem odd the way new kids are odd. You know, they don’t know the slang and right way to dress for their new school and often get teased about it (I was the new kid a lot). Next to school kids, homeschool kids always seem like the new kids- but with more confidence. I also think it’s also all in the persepctive. My 13 year old homeschooled son bumps into old school friends now and then, and he thinks they’re really weird. They work so hard to seem like they don’t care about anything. He recently told me there was no way he was ever going back to school if it made people that strange.
I sometimes wonder whether school makes my son less self-directed. I don’t think it does but I think it does give him less time to be self-directed - and the self-direction is what makes each child unique. Overall I don’t find school a particularly conformist environment but then again, he is only seven.As we live in the middle of a big city his school is big enough and metropolitan enough he’s been able to find friends who are as non-conventional as he is. One reason among many that we send him to school is that having lesbian parents already puts him in the weird camp so I want him to understand from the inside out what it feels like to be in the mainstream (without sacrificing his own ideas and interests, of course.)