Home Schooling - it gets a reaction

Yippee.   I’m in real time now and hoping to stay that way. 

Having no internet access on the boat meant that I couldn’t even set up my blog, never mind write it but now I’ve no excuse.  I’m up and running in some sort of way and it can only get easier.

I find it really interesting that Reluctant Memsahib wrote a really well thought out and heartfelt piece on home schooling today and it has provoked an enormous response.  It seems home schooling does that. 

I have home schooled our three children on our boat now for four years as we have sailed around the Mediterranean Sea and then onto Egypt.  We generally stop in a marina in the winter ( so far in Barcelona, Rome, Istanbul, Marmaris and Red Sea) and Tedd works and I do lots of school with the kids and then sail we for the summers.  Except for August when it’s just too hot in the Med.  Then the kids and I come home to visit family and friends in Ireland while Tedd finds more work.  The kids are now ages 13, 10 and 6.   I never expected that we would go on this long but we have and it’s working really well.

When you stand out and do something a bit different to the norm it can bring out strong and unexpected reactions in people.   A few times I have felt as though the rug has been pulled out from under me.  Typically though, the negative  remarks, and there have not been many, have more impact than the mostly positive ones.  In the short term. 

Overall people are usually very complimentary about our kids.   And very relieved to see how normal they are.  I think we have gone from being an interesting curiousity to a social experiment in the last four years.  “How will they turn out?”