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College Application Essay
by Thaddeus Heuer, now at Brown University
I didn't choose to be taught at home; my parents decided for me. I was four, and my toddler priorities lay elsewhere. Little did I know that I was volunteering for an educational experiment. Every September my
parents and I had our annual discussion about continuing homeschooling versus sending me to "regular" school. I don't know if I thought school would be a bit boring or if I was afraid of change, but I always
chose to stay home. I did go to school for a few classes and for violin lessons, but much of my time there was spent explaining my sporadic attendance to teachers and classmates. I grew accustomed to giving both rote
and wry answers to questions like, "Do you watch TV all day?" The rote answer was "No, of course not. I do the same things you do in school." The wry answer was "Yes, from nine to noon,"
watching their faces form into expressions of disbelief. I didn't tell them I was watching Massachusetts Educational Television on PBS.
When discussing homeschooling with strangers or skeptical parents, the first
question usually concerns "socialization", often posed bluntly as "Do you have any friends?" Sports and orchestra brought me into contact with kids my age, but even then it was a common interest
rather than a common age that drew us together. Over the years, I found wonderful friends in Mendelssohn, O. Henry, a German woman on my paper route who was a World War II refugee, Newsweek, a paralyzed basketball coach
who couldn't walk but still coached me as if he could, history books, and a range of musical instruments from viola to tinwhistle. People are always relieved to discover that I'm not a hermit.
Homeschooling gave
me the freedom to explore and experiment. We Traded houses with an Irish family and lived in Galway for a month. I was never given actual lessons on "how to write a sentence"; I learned as I wrote history
essays. Few schools would have allowed me to research the sinking of the Titanic, but my parents let me read about it, build models of it and learn about watertight bulkheads. (I even managed to finish my math book that
year, too.)
As I got older, people started to ask if being taught at home was going to hinder me in college. After all, they said, you don't know what it's like to work for grades or take classroom tests. Maybe
I did start to second-guess myself, so I took some college courses. My grades indicated what I learned from the professors, but not what I learned from the students. Many of them were older, juggling full-time jobs and
their education, but they really wanted to be in class. One 47 year-old man who was in China during the Cultural Revolution said he was taking biology so "when my son asks why the grass is green, I can tell
him."
Homeschooling was the right choice for me. It taught me to learn outside the classroom, inside the classroom, from other people and from my own mistakes. Above all, homeschooling has given me the
desire to continue learning for the rest of my life. |
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