Originally posted 2005-08-03
Several years ago, the teacher for my Composition II class assigned a personal-experience essay. In that essay, I chose to write about home-schooling’s impact on my education and career thus far. Since we’re on the topic of home-schooling anyway, I’m posting a redacted copy of this essay below. The essay can be read as fairly egotistical. “Tooting my own horn” is not my intent; it’s not difficult to find someone more skilled than me in any area, and my talents and circumstances are gifts from God. Also, I didn’t discuss in the essay my appetite for “mind candy”–mysteries, action novels, etc.
That said…read, evaluate, criticise, and enjoy.
From Baskets to Bytes
I never received a high-school diploma. My grade-school diploma came from an unaccredited private school, and I never had anything really good for show-and-tell in the early grades. I was always at the bottom of my class in school; I never could finish my homework as quickly as could most of my friends. As dismal as my educational state may sound, though, it gives me no cause for alarm. Instead of a high-school diploma, I’m pursuing a college degree. The “unaccredited private school” I attended was in my home, and I was, as the only person in my “class”, perpetually at the top of the class as well as at the bottom. As a homeschooled student, I naturally had more “homework” than my peers, but the freedom to proceed at my own pace with individualized instruction allowed an extremely flexible schedule, freeing time to pursue education in informal ways: besides formal learning, I “showed” and I “told” all the time. The flexibility provided by homeschooling has proven a great boon, enhancing my pursuit of educational and career goals by allowing me to read broadly, to pursue interests to a meaningful depth, and to achieve excellence in my profession through hands-on experience.
An unconventional start to my education set the stage for years of “odd” but effective learning to come: My mother began teaching me to read not by teaching me the alphabet, but by teaching me the sounds of letters. By the time of a checkup at the doctor’s office when I was five years old, I was able to read aloud to him his credentials posted on the wall, but I couldn’t recite the alphabet for him. I developed a love for books at an early age, and visited the public library frequently. Books of almost any sort interested me: from Asimov’s “Foundation” series to collections of “Mathematical Games” columns, from Fahrenheit 451 to The Black Stallion, from Tolkien to C.S. Lewis. I became well-known at the library: I was the kid who took home (literally) a laundry-basket of books at a time. Though I did have to spend time regularly in my core studies, algebra and grammar paled in comparison to the intellectual pleasure from games of logic, to the shudder from Jackson’s “The Lottery”, to the excitement as hobbits cleansed the last vestiges of Mordor’s darkness from their home. Through reading, I gained a wealth of knowledge and learned to appreciate a vast treasury of thought. (Broad reading also contributed to my winning the local County Spelling Bee in seventh grade; studying for the competition reciprocally increased my vocabulary dramatically.) Though formal education provided an essential part of my learning, I gained much value by having sufficient time free to read.
Though I enjoyed many kinds of books, I found myself returning often to a few core interests: computers, logic, mathematics, and investment. Flexibility in my curriculum allowed me to develop these interests. Before my family ever purchased a computer, I had spent numerous hours poring over colorful children’s books detailing how to “create” games for your own computer in BASIC, an elementary programming language. I brought home logic-puzzle books literally by the dozen, and investment books received similar attention. When I was 11, my father purchased a computer, and I began to explore the possibilities of programming and to integrate several of my interests. I wrote a math-review program, a program to visualize the Mandelbrot set (a fractal image generated by iteratively applying a formula to complex numbers), a program to calculate the growth of money under various conditions, and numerous other programs, each of which developed my knowledge a little further. Before long my father, noting my interest in programming, suggested that I learn a “real” programming language in a course at the local community college. The thought excited me, and so it happened that at 13 years old I found myself sitting in a basement classroom from 6 to 10 PM on Thursday evenings learning the lingua franca of the programming world, the language “C++”.
Though after finishing my class in C++ I knew an industry-standard programming language, I still had no real-world experience in its application. My mother, though, had the perfect solution. “Doesn’t A work as a programmer? And didn’t he get all his training on the job? Maybe you could work for the same person he works for!” Although we didn’t know that B, A’s employer, was currently looking for new employees in his software-development company, this sounded like a perfect opportunity. Mom wrote B a letter, describing my training and experience thus far and asking if he had any openings. Several days later, B called back. After several telephone conversations with me and my parents (I was, after all, still 13 at the time), we agreed on a plan: B would design a utility program to coordinate his development team’s work, and he would contract with my father for the creation of the utility, but allow him to dispose of the contract as he wished. Translated, this meant that I would write the program under A’s supervision and tutelage, free of child-labor concerns. Since my school schedule could flex to accommodate some work during normal working hours, I would in this way receive on-the-job training simultaneously with my completion of high school. B, who had previously taught programming at the graduate level, believed this “apprenticeship” method of training to be far superior* to that available through a computer-science degree, and hoped to gain a highly-qualified programmer through it. Apprenticeship has indeed proved to be an excellent model of learning. Through the experience of working closely with a knowledgeable programmer, I have been able to develop a high proficiency in my trade at an age when many are still completing high school. My education continues, though, through problems and solutions encountered on the job, through yet more books, and through formal college classes.
The flexible schedule that homeschooling affords, then, has contributed greatly both to my general education and to proficiency in programming. From allowing development of a laundry basket of interests, to permitting pursuit of a colorful picture of imaginary numbers, to providing a paycheck for learning programming, freedom from a rigid class schedule has allowed me to develop a broad basis of thought, to delve deeply into areas of special interest, and to further develop some of those interests into a career through “apprenticeship” training. Whether devouring baskets of books or manipulating bytes, a liberally structured education has been, is, and will continue to be an integral, valuable part of my life.
*I remember only one of my instructor’s notes on this particular paper: above the text regarding apprenticeship’s perceived superiority as a teaching method, he wrote “Amen!”
