Fantastic Schools Debut
I'm very pleased to be able to share with you all that I'll be appearing at a new blog once a month with an essay, and a book review a few days later. The blog is centered around books about fantasy and science fictional schools and educational processes. L. Jagi Lamplighter and Chris Nuttall will also be writing regularly, and we'll fill in the other weeks of the month with some cool guest posters.
I was a little surprised to be asked to join them. After all, my educational background is, well, more than a little unorthodox, and I'm not even talking about my college years.
Here's the beginning of this month's essay, introducing myself:
The story starts nearly forty years ago, before the homeschool movement had gained much, if any, momentum in the United States. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but in a thumbnail sketch, my parents wanted the best for their children. I came along first, followed by two sisters, one of whom was severely mentally handicapped. As a military family, uprooting every few months to a year was common… so Mom homeschooled us. That wasn’t all part of her decision, of course. She had serious concerns about the quality of ‘education’ public schools would offer us, so she decided that she’d handle it herself, and she did, carrying on even though it wasn’t strictly legal in some of the places we were stationed and lived during my childhood.
In my teen years, after I’d become a happy autodidact, she balked at my maths, and arranged for us to be enrolled in a small Christian school. How small? When I graduated I was the only graduating senior, followed a year later by my sister’s graduating class of two. So my approach to school is… a little different.