We have a unique accumulation of people here at Corban University. As a Christian university in the heart of what some believe to be “hippie territory”, We have a fairly large number of homeschoolers. Now days it’s incredibly easy to get a high school degree from home while still staying connected to the outside world and not become too sheltered; that is if your parents allow it. In those cases when parents don’t allow such interaction with secular society, we end up with those kids who are responsible for every homeschooler stereotype there is. You know what I’m talking about, the socially inept kids who can’t function, yet alone blend in, with society. Here’s the fun part. I was one of those kids!
Okay, to be fair to my parents, I wasn’t actually forcibly cut off from society. I chose to be. I just wasn’t a social kid. In fact, I was so shy and quiet that the first congregation my dad pastored thought he or my mom was abusive. There was just no way that a child could possibly be that quiet and well behaved unless violence was involved, right? Wrong.
My shyness bothered my parents just as much as it did the congregation. My second to oldest sister, however, was the complete opposite. She thrived in social situations and thirsted for human interaction and communication. To this day we still can’t keep her quiet for longer than 10 minutes. While limited human interaction was my dream come true, it was like torture for her.
After my oldest sister graduated and my chatter box sister was a junior in high school, she decided she didn’t want to go her whole life not experiencing school like her elder sister did. So she talked to my parents and they agreed to allow her to go to public school. In fact, they thought it was a terrific idea! So much so that they decided to enroll my brother, a Freshman and myself, a sixth grader.
I cried for several days. You see, for reclusive children such as myself, books, TV, and movies are our best friends. My best friends told me that public school was Dante’s Inferno and middle school was the lowest level, especially if you’re different. If you’re different then you will be bullied and want to die.
It just so happened that I was an incredibly small, home schooled, introverted white baptist pastor’s daughter in a 90% hispanic catholic community. I was about as different as it could get. But by the grace of God my fears were not actualized. I experienced almost no bullying and ended up making a few friends. Not many, but enough to not feel like a total outcast. However, I still didn’t quite enjoy interacting with my classmates too much, not only because we spoke a different language, literally, but even when we were speaking the same language our vocabularies and interests were worlds apart. I was different.
My freshman year of high school I decided to join choir. The teacher was a young man fresh out of college and he was taking on the challenge of restarting the whole district music program after it had been done away with due to budget cuts. The class was chaotic. Everyone in there was taking it because they thought it would be an easy A, except about five girls. I was one of those girls.
Two years later that teacher shared with me an audio diary he recorded which accounted how he felt on that first day of class. In that recording he said that his hopes of restarting the program successfully were slim to none. The kids showed no interest and he felt almost instantly defeated. At the end of the recording he added that his only hope was keeping Amity (me) interested. Long story a little less long, he did.
We ended up relying on each other for the next four years. I helped him get accustomed to teaching and he helped me gain enormous amounts of confidence. Being in choir taught me that there are people who are like me in some ways, as well as how to communicate and form connections with people who were my complete opposites.
By the time I graduated high school I had held seven positions of student office, been a part of six committees, was on four teams, was in three theater productions, and was voted ‘Most Spirited’ for class favorites. It goes without saying that I’m no longer extremely shy and antisocial. Do I need my alone time every now and then? Yes. Do I sometimes feel completely overwhelmed in large crowds? Absolutely. The change is that now I can utilize the skills and attributes I gained from homeschooling through the knowledge of social norms and emotional intelligence I gained through public school.
There are definitely positives and negatives to every method of schooling under the sun; I was lucky enough to get the best of two of them. The transition was definitely rough, and I may have held a grudge against my parents for throwing me into the lion's den for a while, but now I am so glad they did. That’s how I became the person I am today and I wouldn’t want to be anybody else.
