Homeschooling and Competition... or the Lack of It.

by Andrea Hermitt | More from this Blogger

20 Feb 2007 09:11 AM

Valorie Delp recently wrote about homeschoolers and competition in Keeping Up With the Jones. In this post she cautioned against the overwhelming urge homeschooling parents have to compete with each other and therefore prove to ourselves that we are doing a good job.

Personally, one of the things I like about homeschooling is the lack of competition. While competition does exist in the homeschooling world, it is not quite as visible as it is for public schooled kids. I distinctly remember as a grade school child, the Friday exams and conversations that followed. "What grade did you get", we would ask each other. "88", "92", "95" the numbers would be revealed. Then an unhappy student would reply "99", and we would all glare. Our envy would not last long, however, because we usually ended up the child crying in the corner because they got a 70 and were afraid of getting punished when they got home. Because of our Friday test days, 1/5 of our school experience was very stressful.

As we moved through middle school and into the upper grades, the competition became fierce. Friendships and enemies were made based on nothing other than test scores. The competition was not always unhealthy, but in the last 2 years of high school, these test scores started to define who we were going to be. In our minds, those who tested well, were deemed to be "most successful" and those who tested poorly were doomed to forever be the class clown.

If we only knew the truth. As an adult, I know of many class clowns who are filthy rich, and of those most likely to succeed, many are merely surviving. By homeschooling being able to ignore those pesky grade comparisons, we can work on nurturing the traits that will make a child a successful adult: character.

Stay tuned for my next installment on Homeschooling and Competition: Healthy, vs. Unhealthy

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Learn more about Andrea Hermitt

Andrea Hermitt is a native New Yorker currently residing in GA. She has been married for over 16 years and has two teenage children.

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