Read Through My Eyes for Free Online

to discover alternate and better ways to learn, ways that were unique to us as students.
    My mom would read articles to us from the newspaper, or have us read them ourselves as we got older, and then we would identify and discuss the character issues in them. We could always find something to talk about in most every article. As we ate breakfast together as a family, we would read through Psalms and Proverbs. Both of my parents were not just casually interested in our memorizing a large number of Bible verses; they required it. To help us, Mom would put the verses to music in songs that she had made up. Memorizing our verses paid off in a number of ways. One which was very important to us was that we knew we couldn’t play sports or watch our favorite Saturday-night program, MacGyver —we all loved MacGyver , because it was the only Saturday-night program in English that we got in the Philippines—until we had successfully recited our five verses for the week. And it never seemed to fail that there was usually some frantic Saturday-afternoon studying going on in our house as the time for MacGyver crept closer.
    Another thing that I think homeschooling helped me with was that we all learned how to talk to adults at a much earlier age than some of our friends. Or at least it seemed that way to me. Regardless, the ability we acquired in being able to talk with and be around adults has benefitted me greatly. Somewhere in that homeschooling process and travels I developed a comfort level in being able to talk to adults, to properly and politely address them, and to interact with them in so many different settings. I think that’s because my parents made sure we were always included in most things they were involved in and around older adults. We weren’t just surrounded by kids like ourselves all day who were just speaking at our own level of maturity and content. We were challenged to grow in being able to build and have relationships with others—of all ages.
    Don’t get me wrong. It was still school, albeit with really small classes: one teacher, one student. My mom gave us grades for every class. She was tough with the amount of work she gave us, but at the end of the day, she was a pretty easy grader, because she was always trying to encourage us. She did insist that we always take year-end tests, however, because she wanted an outside assessment of how we were doing. Also, she and my dad began to suspect I might have a chance at a college scholarship, so they wanted to make sure we all were exposed to testing.
    People say you’ll miss out on things by being homeschooled, like the prom and other traditional activities that you experience in an institutional school setting. The truth was that we were always so active in sports at various schools that we usually got invited to other activities like proms or other dances and really didn’t miss out on the opportunity to participate in any of that if we chose to. Of course, there were things that, due to homeschooling, I probably missed out on. At times I wondered if there were friendships with other kids my age that I wasn’t experiencing. Ultimately, though, being very active in sports and church helped a lot with that, since we made many friends through those outlets.
    In addition to the friends I made through church and sports, I made other friends through an organization Mom started, which she called First At Home, about twenty years ago. It started small—there weren’t many homeschool families at the time—but we had so many families that got involved in the years afterward that it became an integral part of the homeschooling culture. It involved participating together on a regular basis in various learning and recreational experiences. For example, we’d go on field trips as a homeschool group. So then we had all those new friends from other homeschooling homes that we got to know better and looked forward to being with, around Thanksgiving celebrations, and