It's Official! We're Homeschooling

One of the best decisions I've made in this "do we or don't we?" process was to make an appointment with the high school principal. Claus and I walked out of that meeting 100% committed to homeschooling. The principal is a nice guy and I'm sure he runs a good school, but school is not the place for Claus.

It appears that the benefit of high school is more classes, so you are more likely to find a class you might actually be interested in, unlike middle school. Otherwise it's the same old thing. I deliberately didn't tell Mr. Principal that I spoke teacher, so after spending fifteen minutes swearing up and down that his teachers don't assign busywork, he started in with the educationese that proved he was a liar. For example, English classes "concentrate on grammar and mechanics" means "we do a lot of punctuation worksheets." "Math teachers are free to decide which subset of skills from the first test to visit again on the second test, and the third test" means scope and sequence. I've already told you how much I hate that.

The worst part was his attitude. I began the meeting by saying that Claus was ADD and highly gifted, so we were interested in options like curriculum compacting, etc. Despite that, Mr. Principal told us that, while all their classes are "college-track", they offer "regular" classes as well as "advanced" ones, implying Claus didn't need to worry about the classes being too hard. He said flat out that 14- and 15-year-olds aren't capable of taking charge of their own education. And suggested he might consider taking one advanced course a year. Oh, really???

After he lied about what classes the state required for graduation (I'd looked that up on the web yesterday), I stopped listening. Unbelieveable. Anyway, we can knowledgeably rule that out as an option. :D