Tag Archives: K through 12

Do You Know What Lack of Social Interaction Can Do To a Child

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Sherri Lackey

I was recently watching an old episode of Criminal Minds where Matthew Gray Gubler’s character Dr. Spencer Reid blurts out something to the effect, “Do you know what lack of social interaction can do to child?”

I was annoyed and amused by the dialogue at the same time. In the story-line the psychopathic killer was *gasp* one of those scary anti-social homeschool types.  I couldn’t believe I just sat through the whole absurd plot-line just to get to the actual gist of the show which was clearly to besmirch and scandalize homeschooling families.

I could laugh at the premise of the show simply because it is not true. But what made me angry is the certain fact that I know people watch fictional television and form their belief systems based on fiction. I know there are people who came away from watching that episode with a shiver going down their spines thinking about the scary homeschool family who lives down the street from them, wondering if one of those children might sneak into their home and murder them in their sleep. But what can you do? People will believe what they want to believe.

Meanwhile, there is homeschooling reality. I can’t speak for all homeschooling families but I know one family particularly well and that family is my own.  While we live in a small town, my children did not grow up in a bubble devoid of social interaction. That is not the intent of any homeschool that I know of.

Here is what I do know about my children’s social interaction with the outside world. They have their own businesses in which they have regular social interaction with their clients. Their businesses are thriving because they are well liked by their clientele. They regularly receive compliments from their older clients who are amazed at how polite and professional they are given their youth since their clientele are not accustomed to such polite and professional treatment from my children’s peers.

Do you see what homeschool interaction can do to a child? Shocking isn’t it?

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August Reflections on Homeschooling

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Sherri Lackey

There were a few bumps along the way as with anything in life. I had my goals and ideals. I made detailed plans for our school year which almost always got revamped and changed by the middle of the school year.

I have seen many benefits to homeschooling over the years. The chart on the upper right shows homeschools having higher overall academic achievement. That was once a primary goal of mine in the beginning. As time passed however, my primary goal was to impart a biblical worldview to my children. Imparting a worldview is the goal of every educational system. The U.S. government school system has a worldview it wants to impart to the children in its system as well. School systems in other countries impart their worldviews to their children. When it gets right down to it, that is the purpose of every school system, not to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic in a neutral environment, but to impart a way of thinking about and viewing the world. There are no neutral school environments.

I also made observations. Mostly I observed families who did or did not homeschool. Here is what I found: I have seen homeschool families who succeed. I have seen homeschool families who fail. I have seen public school families who succeed. I have seen public school families who fail. In the end, does it matter where one educates their child? Yes and No. Ultimately it does come back to the worldview idea in some ways. Those parents who impart a strong biblical worldview to their children whether or not they homeschool, tend to do well. Those parents who put the primary focus on other things (like higher academic achievement among other things), whether or not they homeschool, tend to not do well.

Was homeschooling the right thing to do in our family? Yes, it was. It has not only shaped my children into the persons that they are today, but it has shaped me as well. I have grown as a person by being my children’s teacher. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything. It was time well spent.

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Homeschool Myth #1: Lack of Social Skills

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Sherri Lackey
Example of an American grocery store aisle.

Image via Wikipedia

Some people lack social skills and in my personal opinion it has little to do with what type of school you attended. Ever since I’ve homeschooled my three children I have become familiar with the popular myth which says homeschooled students lack proper socialization. My son recently asked me where this idea started and I replied that it was pulled out of thin air; it is nothing but someone’s idea. Of those who hold to this idea I wonder what they would think of my eighteen-year-old twin sons’ chosen college major: Communication.

A funny thing happened to my daughter recently; I think it was funny anyway. She thought it was rude and annoying. It was rude and annoying, no doubt, but I’m trying to encourage her to find the humor in it.

She has recently landed her first part-time job. She is fifteen and landing a job in this economy is an amazing feat. She applied for a job as a cashier at a local grocery store and was hired the next day. She has one of the sweetest temperaments I have ever seen, much sweeter than my own I assure you. She also has a bright, friendly smile. She has no enemies and is generally well liked.

One day as she was cashiering, a customer asked her how school was going. She said it was going well and mentioned that she is homeschooled. The customer disapproved of homeschooling and began listing off all the things he thought was wrong with homeschooling, the foremost being a lack of proper social skills.

He had already paid for his items and there were other people lined up behind him, yet he stood there expressing his ideas on homeschooling to my daughter.

After she told me of this incident I could not help seeing the humor in it. A complete stranger, who knows nothing about my daughter at all except that she is doing well in her home studies, proceeds to tell her, while holding up waiting customers behind him, how socially inept she must be.

For her part she smiled and listened politely.

I love it when people like this man unwittingly validate homeschooling!

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Farmington, New Mexico: The Descent

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Sherri Lackey

I can’t remember much about my eighth grade year other than the school photo which looks like a wore a shaggy dog on my head on school picture day. My hair trials continued throughout the year.

I hardly remember any of my classes, obviously the uniqueness of being in junior high had worn off by then. I remember band the best. I was in marching band and I really liked that a lot. We had no uniforms like the other schools in town. Mr. Ashley didn’t think the uniforms were in good repair and had tossed them into the garbage. He then requested new uniforms but the administration said no. Mr. Ashley grumbled something about all the money being used on the football team and a hot tub for the football team members. Mr. Ashley was young and idealistic I suppose. I guess he learned his lesson: Arts and music matter little to schools; athletic programs are paramount. It’s obvious when you think about it. School mascots are blazoned across the walls and on articles of clothing. In schools, athletics is a religion and every knee must bow. So Mr. Ashley did not get new uniforms and we marched in white jeans and green t-shirts, the colors of Tibbetts Junior High’s gods – The Titans. How appropriate that titans should be the school’s mascot!

I had a crush on a fellow band member toward the end of the year. My best friend had a crush on him too and we would talk or writes notes back and forth to each other discussing his dreaminess. Somehow or other one of the cheerleaders found out about our crush and she harassed us about it. We should have just ignored her. That would have been the mature thing to do, but we were not mature. Instead we resented her for it and this resent began to build against her and the beautiful (read that: popular) people of Tibbetts. Who did they think they were that they would persecute us if we had a harmless crush on another student? This resentment continued to build through the summer break.

My mother had had enough with my crooked teeth and sent me to an orthodontist who sat me in his torture chair and applied scratchy brackets to my teeth and interlaced them with wires which he tightened every few weeks. I sat quietly while he did this but in my mind I called him terrible names and complained bitterly. My teeth didn’t concern me as much as my hair did.

I decided to tame my hair over summer break. First I submitted it to chemical treatment which turned it shockingly blond. I loved being a blond. I still do. But in the early days of my blondness I noticed something happening which had never happened before. Males noticed me, both teens and adult men. I was ecstatic. I would go walk the mall just to enjoy all the attention I got in the way of looks and glances from guys. I felt that I could perhaps join the ranks of the beautiful people the following year at school. My mother made sure that didn’t happen.

She wasn’t happy with my hair color, preferring a dark ash blond to my shocking blond. She insisted that I tone down my hair color and she purchased a hair color that had a bluing agent in it. She has always hated red hair with a vengeance; it’s a form of prejudice really. I guess my shocking blond had a bit of red in it which she despised. She was sure the blue would take care of that. It did take care of the red and it left my hair a shocking color of what I call “granny blue”. My mom loved it.

I began ninth grade with this hair color and immediately all the beautiful people swarmed me with derision and cruel jokes. They were just having fun, at my expense, yes, but they were just doing what was in their nature to do. After they had their fun, I’m sure they forgot me right away and went on to enjoy some other perverse pleasure. But I resented it. I hated them with every ounce of meaning that the word “hate” implies. If I had been the character of Carrie in Stephen King’s horror, I would have enacted the same vengeance on them that Carrie did on her enemies. I am glad I did not have Carrie’s power and I am glad that my parents did not have any guns I could have gotten my hands on. Today I watch stories of school shootings and think, that crazy gun-toting kid could have been me in the ninth grade.

Things only got worse after that. My anger began to rise to the surface and I openly ridiculed my attackers to their faces which only brought more derision by them my way. At one point I was accused of starting a rumor about one of them being pregnant. I didn’t start the rumor but they were convinced I had.

One day I was surrounded in the hallway by a group bent on revenge for the rumor they said I started. They threatened to beat me up. I would have willingly fought with any one of them but not a whole pack of them at once. I was truly frightened. I managed to evade them everyday, but soon I started developing an ulcer and my stomach hurt terribly.

My mother tried talking to the principal about the kids who had threatened me. I said his hands were tied and there was nothing he could do. But there was a bright ray of hope that appeared toward Christmas. My parents had put our house up for sale. The power plant my dad had helped build was completed and he was out of a job. They planned on moving back to my hometown. My mom disenrolled me from Tibbetts before Christmas break. I breathed a sigh of relief. But then they delayed our move till summer. I didn’t want to go back to Tibbetts!

My mom enrolled me in a Christian school which was ran by the local Assembly of God church. I had had a good experience in the Christian school I had attended in Alpine, Texas and so I had high hopes for this school. I didn’t realize that kids who get kicked out of public school for being troublemakers often get enrolled in private Christian schools by parents who are at their wits ends.

But my experience there was not all bad. Sure I was singled out again by the girl who ran the school. She wasn’t popular or beautiful; she was a thug and she had her group of toadies which followed her. When I first met her she cut me some slack. I think she was feeling me out, trying to see if I would make a good toady. I didn’t make the cut however and that was when she began to pester me on a regular basis. The worse she ever tried to do to me was drop a two-by-four on my head as I was coming up the back stairs of the school one day. A senior boy caught it before it hit me. This heroic gesture earned him my favor and I developed a bit of a crush on him. He actually scolded Lisa for nearly hitting me in the head! She said nothing in her defense that I recall.

Lisa also picked on the teachers. She sent one of them crying out of the schoolroom one day. Lisa was suspended for that. I had hoped she was gone for good but she was back the following week. Her parents were big shots in the Assembly of God I was told. After that however, the principal and the teacher seemed to take compassion on me because my desk was next to Lisa’s. I was in the junior high room; there was an adjoining high school room. I was told that I could move to the high school room which I gladly did.

The school was like the other Christian school I had attended. The students could make their own schedules concerning how many pages they completed each week. I had little else to do there and so I started flying through my worktexts with a speed that shocked the principal and teacher.

Still, I didn’t like being there all day long. It was tedious. So, toward the end of the school year, I got brave enough to ask if I could go home for the day at noon. The principal said it was against school policy (and probably state policy too)…but, it was the end of the year almost and I was several weeks ahead in my worktexts…so yeah, I could go home at noon. Yes!!!!!!!! What joy! What rapture!

Something else happened to me that school year. I had begun the year with an ever-deepening hatred toward certain students at Tibbetts. Sometime after my mom had disenrolled me from Tibbetts I sat down to read my Bible. I don’t think I had done that in a long time, maybe not since I attended the first Christian school in second and third grades. We didn’t go to church anywhere ever since the end of second grade. My parents had had a “supernatural, charismatic” experience and no regular church cut it for them after that. Instead, they watched TV preachers like Fred Price, Robert Schuller, and a variety of word/faith teachers on Sunday. I hadn’t had any solid Bible teaching in years.

But I sat down in my room and read one of the gospels one day. I read about forgiveness and I thought that I needed to forgive the kids at Tibbetts. I did and I prayed about it too. Something began to change in my life after that and I wonder now if that was when I became a Christian. I had made a profession of faith at the age of five and I was baptised at the age of seven; I suppose it might have been a true conversion then, but something makes me doubt that…so maybe it was that day in my bedroom when I was fourteen with me just reading the Bible and for the first time that I recall, actually understanding what it was saying.

I wouldn’t have any real biblical training until I was an adult, but I did have a hunger for God’s Word from that point in my bedroom and onward. It changed my attitude and I was able to deal with other kids whether kind or mean which I encountered the remainder of my school days.

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Alpine, Texas: Two Good Years

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Sherri Lackey

My school days are not some of my fondest memories but there were some years scattered here and there which were good overall. My second and third grade years in school were two such years.

We attended Second Baptist Church in Alpine. It is no longer in existence. But when it was in existence the church opened a Christian school and I attended it for two years. The back part of the church was designated the school room and it accommodated second through twelfth grades. The Kindergarten and first grade classes were held in a mobile home that sat on the church property.

Just prior to attending this school I had started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books and I was fascinated with her description of the one-room schoolhouse she attended. Added to that, my father had attended a one-room schoolhouse. I was completely disillusioned with modern institutional schools after my first grade experience and so I had high hopes for my new one-room school experience. I was not disappointed.

It was the standard model of private Christian school for its day. The desks were partitioned off into cubicles which were called ‘offices’. I liked my ‘office’. It had a cubby hole to place my workbooks in. The workbooks were called ‘paces’. As the curriculum was set up, I was allowed to set the number of pages I wanted to do in each of my workbooks for the entire week. I am sure they had a minimum page requirement but if a student wanted to work more than that minimum they could. Instead of an instructing teacher we had monitors who walked around the room waiting for someone to raise a flag on their desk if they had a question.

I didn’t particularly like the polyester uniforms we had to wear but other than that I didn’t have much to complain about. The uniforms were a patriotic red, white, and blue color scheme. All the girls had to wear dresses which was fine until a sandstorm kicked up and pelted our legs with grit until they stung.

There was no playground other than a small slab of concrete someone poured atop a hill. We would often play foursquare up there. Other than that we were content to run around on the rock covered ground. The only rule I remember was that no one was allowed to throw rocks which was a major offense punishable by swats. I think some of the boys broke this rule occasionally, rock throwing being too much of a temptation for them.

From my old school, Tracy Windham also came to school there for a year. His parents moved somewhere else after that. I still liked Tracy and was the only girl to have the distinction of being called his girlfriend. I thought this was significant at the time. I was sad to see him go. I wouldn’t like another little boy so well until my fifth grade year in another school and in another town. I don’t know what ever happened to Tracy. I don’t suppose our paths will ever cross again. But my path did cross again with the other little boy that I met in the fifth grade and I married him when I was twenty-two when we were both in college. That is a story of another place and time however; it has nothing to do with Alpine.

My best friend during my second, third, and fourth grade years was a girl named Michelle. I don’t know what ever happened to Michelle. I hope she has had a happy life. When we first met her parents were separated or divorced. I had never encountered a friend from a divorced family until that time. She lived with her dad and her two sisters lived with her mom. At some point after meeting her, her parents decided to get back together. I never liked her sisters very much, they differed in looks and personality from Michelle, who of course, had a few freckles and mousey brown hair. The sisters were both blond and had clear complexions. That wasn’t the reason I didn’t like them. The older one had a superior attitude which was probably brought about by her being older than us. The younger sister whined and cried whenever she didn’t get her way and that annoyed me. I didn’t like whiny children very much. But I put up with the sisters because they were part of the package deal of having Michelle as my best friend.

I was distressed for a short time when third grade was about to begin. Michelle’s parents decided to put her and her sisters back into public school. I wasn’t sure how I could cope without Michelle. I remember praying for God to send me a friend who would also be in third grade or second grade even. I was desperate!

When school started there was a new second grade girl named Miriam who had short brown hair. I can’t remember if she had freckles or not. She had an annoying little sister too but I was used to that. They too were from a family broken by divorce and they lived with their father and grandmother.

From the moment I met Miriam she looked a bit lost and in need of a friend. I was happy to be that for her. I decided I was good at being a friend to the lonely and lost. I viewed it as a mission of sorts, maybe it was. It did give me a sense of purpose as I attended school.

I liked Miriam, but Michelle still remained my best friend and by the following year I wanted to go to the same school Michelle was attending. That marked the end of good school memories for quite a long time.

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Alpine, Texas: School Daze

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Sherri Lackey

When I was five my mother enrolled me in Kindergarten. At that time Kindergarten was optional in Texas, it still may be optional for all I know. It was a good thing for me that it was optional because I was not ready for school. I was very unhappy in Kindergarten. The teachers were all very nice and I had no trouble with any of the kids. I did get grossed out at snack-time with other kids’ runny noses. They thought I was funny as I gagged down my snacks and tried not to look at them. All in all I preferred my folded sleeping bag on the concrete floor of The Dairy Twist over Kindergarten. So I dropped out of school. My mother told me I had to attend first grade the following year because it was the law.

I was pretty excited about first grade actually. My mom bought me a lunchbox and that was pretty cool. She also bought me a bright red school satchel. Bright red is still my favorite color. She bought me several pretty dresses too. She ordered them from a catalog. I was quite happy to think about starting school that year.

Then reality hit me upside the head like a baseball bat. Mrs. Stovell was not a teacher; she was a tyrant. She struck terror in my six-year-old heart. From that first day of school forward I protested school every morning. I cried pitifully and I went limp. My mother had to dress me because I refused to dress myself. I was not alone. Other parents had to drag their crying children into Mrs. Stovell’s classroom each morning as well. My mother tried to get me transferred to another classroom but the principal said he couldn’t remove every child from Mrs. Stovell’s class. Thus was my introduction to the typical wimpy principal which I would encounter over and over again during my school years.

I somehow muddled my way through first grade. I wanted to learn to read and so that seemed to come easy for me despite Mrs. Stovell’s strange social structure experiments she devised for her students. She had divided us into classes of students: smart, average, below average, and stupid. The stupid ones could sit at their desks all day coloring while she gave them no instruction whatsoever. If they caused trouble they were sent to sit in the hall. I wanted her to send me to sit in the hall, but she never did. I think I was stuck in the average or below average group. Nevertheless I somehow learned to read.

Math was another thing altogether. I simply did not understand the concept of addition and subtraction. I had no natural bent for it as I did for reading. For a while I suffered with math papers marked with bright red marks which, though it was my favorite color, only made me very unhappy. Stovell ridiculed me for not knowing what 3 plus 2 was in front of my peers. I said it was four. Since I did not understand the concept of addition I thought maybe the answer was the consecutive number which followed two and three. I finally admitted my math failure to my mother who sat down and within minutes explained addition and subtraction to me. My math scores improved after her simple instruction. Would that have been so hard for Mrs. Stovell to do? But as I said, she was a tyrant and not a teacher.

I hated recess because I did not enjoy playing duck, duck, goose and any other variation of that game. I wasn’t a fast runner and so I often despaired of ever not being ‘it’. I enjoyed the merry-go-round a little too much one day and threw up on the playground. I soon gave up group play and started bringing my small dolls from home and I played with them under a shady tree. Occasionally a girl or two would come up to me probably wanting me to give them an invitation to play with my dolls. I don’t think I ever did. I was selfish with my toys as I had no young brothers or sisters to play with. My brother was in high school and didn’t play with toys. Once, Tracy Windham came by, I liked him, probably because he had freckles like my old friend Lisa. I would play with him and occasionally with a girl named Molly. I think she had freckles too.

My school consented to letting me go home to eat my lunch. I had been disillusioned by my school cafeteria experience. My parents liked to eat at a restaurant called Furr’s Cafeteria and I think this is where my confusion came into play. I expected the school cafeteria to look like a restaurant complete with tables and nice tablecloths. I was expecting a fine dining experience. Instead I was treated to a cold institutional environment that was loud and smelly. I never have liked the smell of school cafeteria food. There is nothing appetizing about that odor. So, I went home to eat my lunch.

After lunch we got to watch Sesame Street in the darkened music room. That was my favorite part of my school day. After that a few more hours would have to be endured until the final bell rang and we were released from our imprisonment for the day.

I did get two reprieves that year which I was so thankful for. First, I got chicken pox and I missed several days of school. Following that I caught the mumps and was out of school for several more days again. I felt like I was the luckiest girl on earth.

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